Is there a shortage of critical foreign language skills in the United States? Recent concerns about national security and economic globalization suggest increased demand and wage premia for foreign language speakers. The use of English as the international language, however, suggests a decrease in demand for foreign language skills in the United States. To address this question, we study a representative sample of U.S. college graduates. Ordinary least squares regressions with controls for cognitive ability, nonparametric methods based on the propensity score, and panel data methods suggest a 2%-3% wage premium for college graduates who can speak a second language. Copyright (c) 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.