Language Proficiency and Returns to Female Immigrants in Canada

Scientific Study from the year 2016 in the subject Economics - Job market economics, University of Waterloo, course: Labour Economics, language: English, abstract: The literature on returns to immigrants has paid little attention to female immigrants despite continuous increases in female labor force participation and its peculiarities.

Using the 2011 National Households Survey of Canada, this paper investigates the effect of language proficiency on returns to female immigrant groups in Canada and the effect across wage distributions.

Our results show that returns to female immigrant groups increase with the level of language proficiency and that language penalizes immigrants at higher quantiles of wage distribution more. Also, we find that OLS estimates are biased and inconsistent where sample selection problems exist.