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Temporary Migration, Human Capital, and Language Fluency of Migrants
Author(s) -
Dustmann Christian
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.725
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1467-9442
pISSN - 0347-0520
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9442.00158
Subject(s) - duration (music) , human capital , economics , fluency , immigration , investment (military) , work (physics) , labour economics , physical capital , financial capital , capital (architecture) , demographic economics , financial economics , market economy , linguistics , political science , geography , art , mechanical engineering , philosophy , literature , politics , law , engineering , archaeology
This paper investigates human capital investment of immigrants whose duration in the host country is limited, either by contract or by their own choice. The first part of the paper develops a model which distinguishes between temporary migrations where the return time is exogenous or optimally chosen. The analysis has a number of interesting implications for empirical work, some of which are explored in the second part of the paper. The analysis focuses on language capital and tests the hypothesis that country specific human capital investments are sensitive to the duration in the host country's labour market. The results show that the acquisition of language capital is sensitive to the intended duration in the host country.