Language skills and labor market performance of immigrants in the Netherlands

Abstract

Many immigrants in the Netherlands have poor Dutch language skills. They face problems in speaking and reading Dutch. Our paper investigates how these problems affect their labor market performance in terms of employment, hours of work and wages. We find that for female immigrants language problems have significantly negative effects on hourly wages but not on employment probability and hours of work. For male immigrants language problems do not affect employment probability, hours of work or hourly wages.