Labor Market Differences Between Bilingual and Monolingual Hispanics

• In Event: 75.012 - Rethinking Bilingual Education: New Research on the Economic Benefits of Bilingualism

Abstract

Objective: This paper explores three primary questions: (1) Do bilingual and monolingual Hispanics experience different levels of labor market participation, employment rates, and annual wages? (2) Do any outcomes change when accounting for individual characteristics (such as gender and educational attainment)? (3) Do any differences vary according to concentration of Spanish speakers in the area in which individuals reside?
Perspective: This is a labor economics analysis, takes an economics of education perspective.
Methods: Author uses regression analyses and controls for educational attainment, “citizenship process” (manner of acquiring citizenship), marital status, race, year of entry (if born abroad), class of worker (i.e., type of employer), weeks worked in past 12 months, and in all analyses age, age squared, and age cubed are included to allow for flexibility in the relationships between age and outcomes. The author also builds several models to analyze each outcome: labor market participation, employment, and annual wages.
Data Sources: Secondary analysis of American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, 2006-2011.
Results: Consistent with prior studies in the United States that explored bilingual–monolingual wage differences among Hispanic males, the current study finds evidence that male bilinguals earn slightly lower wages, other factors held constant. In the current study, bilingual Hispanic males earned 2% lower wages than observationally similar monolingual Hispanic males, and there was no evidence of a wage gap between observationally similar bilingual and monolingual Hispanic females. However, the study found virtually no evidence of lower outcomes for bilinguals when the concentration of Spanish speakers exceeded 50%. In fact, in the case of labor market participation, bilingual males participated significantly more than monolingual males when the concentration was above 50%. Among females, the participation gap favored bilinguals throughout most of the concentration distribution, and the gap increasingly favored bilinguals as the percentage of Spanish speakers in the area neared 100%.
Scholarly Significance: This study both supports prior findings with census data regarding bilinguals in the labor force, and also contributes new findings regarding concentrations of Spanish speakers in a labor market region and finds some differences for females, who have rarely been included in prior studies. The study also points out the significant limitations of census data to determine differences in labor market outcomes for bilinguals, especially for younger cohorts.

Author

• Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign