Journal article
Language Barriers and Immigrant Health
A Clarke, IE Isphording
Health Economics United Kingdom | WILEY | Published : 2017
DOI: 10.1002/hec.3358
Abstract
We study the impact of language deficiency on the health status of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi-experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins. In the presence of considerable non-classical measurement error in self-reported language proficiency, our results provide lower and upper bounds for a strong negative effect of English deficiency on health of between one half and a full standard deviation in the health score. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Grants
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Mathias Sinning for his initial input and contribution, the participants of ESPE 2014 in Braga, the SOLE 2015 in Montreal and seminars in Jena and Hannover for helpful comments. This paper uses unit record data from the HILDA survey. The HILDA project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to either Department of Social Services or the Melbourne Institute.