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Language Barriers and Immigrant Health
Author(s) -
Clarke Andrew,
Isphording Ingo E.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.3358
Subject(s) - immigration , identification (biology) , demographic economics , language barrier , psychology , linguistics , sociology , geography , economics , philosophy , botany , archaeology , biology
SUMMARY We study the impact of language deficiency on the health status of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi‐experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins. In the presence of considerable non‐classical measurement error in self‐reported language proficiency, our results provide lower and upper bounds for a strong negative effect of English deficiency on health of between one half and a full standard deviation in the health score. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.