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Fertility, Health and Education of UK Immigrants: The Role of English Language Skills

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Abstract

This paper aims to identify the causal effect of English language skills on fertility, health and education outcomes of immigrants in England and Wales. To estimate this causal effect, we use the instrumental variable estimation strategy where age at arrival in the United Kingdom (UK) is exploited to construct an instrument for language skills. The idea of exploiting age at arrival is based on the phenomenon that a person who is exposed to a new language within the critical period of language acquisition (i.e., childhood) learns the language more easily. This implies that immigrants who arrive in the UK at a young age have on average better English language skills than those who arrive when they are older. Using a unique individual-level dataset that links census and life event records for the population living in England and Wales at the 2011 Census, we find that better English language skills significantly delay the age at which a woman has her first child, lower the likelihood that she has a child in her teens, and decrease the number of children she gives birth to, but do not affect her children’s birthweight and an individual’s self-reported health. The impact on educational achievement is also considerable: better English skills significantly raise the probability of obtaining academic degrees and significantly lower the probability of having no qualifications.

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  • Yu Aoki & Lualhati Santiago, 2015. "Fertility, Health and Education of UK Immigrants: The Role of English Language Skills," CINCH Working Paper Series 1510, Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health, revised Aug 2015.
  • Handle: RePEc:duh:wpaper:1510
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    Cited by:

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    3. Marcus Dillender, 2017. "English Skills and the Health Insurance Coverage of Immigrants," American Journal of Health Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(3), pages 312-345, Summer.
    4. Arnaud Herault, 2019. "Occupational mismatch and network effects: Evidence from France," Post-Print hal-02860040, HAL.
    5. Andrew Clarke & Ingo E. Isphording, 2017. "Language Barriers and Immigrant Health," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(6), pages 765-778, June.
    6. Clarke, Damian & Mühlrad, Hanna, 2016. "The Impact of Abortion Legalization on Fertility and Maternal Mortality: New Evidence from Mexico," Working Papers in Economics 661, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    7. Elizabeth Lemmon, 2018. "Utilisation of personal care services in Scotland: the influence of unpaid carers," CINCH Working Paper Series 1802, Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health.
    8. Aoki, Yu & Santiago, Lualhati, 2018. "Deprivation, Segregation, and Socioeconomic Class of UK Immigrants: Does English Proficiency Matter?," IZA Discussion Papers 11368, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Fischer, Martin & Karlsson, Martin & Prodromidis, Nikolaos, 2021. "Long‐term Effects of Hospital Deliveries," CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) 74712, Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Language skills; fertility; health; education; natural experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth

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