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Foreign Languages and their Impact on Unemployment
Author(s) -
Donado Alejandro
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
labour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1467-9914
pISSN - 1121-7081
DOI - 10.1111/labr.12097
Subject(s) - unemployment , german , immigration , foreign language , demographic economics , focus (optics) , economics , political science , labour economics , linguistics , psychology , economic growth , mathematics education , philosophy , physics , optics , law
Abstract Using a large European data set, I investigate the impact of knowing foreign languages on unemployment for the first time. The focus is on natives (not on immigrants). I find that (1) knowing a foreign language reduces the probability of being unemployed by at least 3.4 percentage points; (2) females benefit more than males from learning foreign languages; (3) English and German tend to have a larger and more robust impact on unemployment than French, Spanish, and Italian; (4) but the impact of all these five languages varies considerably across countries.