Bleakley, Hoyt, and Aimee Chin. 2008. “What Holds Back the Second Generation? The Intergenerational Transmission of Language Human Capital among Immigrants.” Journal of Human Resources 43(2): 267–298.
In 2000 Census microdata, various outcomes of second-generation immigrants are related to their parents’ age at arrival in the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the “critical period” of language acquisition. We interpret this as an effect of the parents’ English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for parental English proficiency. Estimates of the effect of parents’ English-speaking proficiency using two-stage least squares yield significant, positive results for children’s English-speaking proficiency and preschool attendance, and significant, negative results for dropping out of high school and being below age-appropriate grade.
Hoyt Bleakley is an assistant professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. Aimee Chin is an associate professor of economics at the University of Houston and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They thank Frank Bean, Eli Berman, Nora Gordon, Gordon Hanson, Chinhui Juhn, Peter Mieszkowski, Stephen Trejo, two anonymous referees, and participants at the Fall 2004 NBER Education Meeting and the 2005 SOLE/EALE Meetings for helpful comments and discussion. They gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03-HD051562), Rice University’s Baker Institute, University of California’s Linguistic Minority Research Institute, and University of Houston’s GEAR Program. The data used in this paper can be obtained October 2008 through September 2011 from Aimee Chin, University of Houston Department of Economics, 204 McElhinney Hall, Houston, TX 77204-5019, achin@uh.edu. Bleakley and Chin Appendix (www.ssc.wisc.edu/jhr/) available in PDF format.