The effect of deficiency at English on female immigrants’ wage in the UK: correcting for measurement error, endogenous treatment, and sample selection bias

ABSTRACT

We investigate how English as Additional Language (EAL) affects the wage gap among foreign-born female immigrants in the UK. To deal with endogeneity and measurement error of EAL and self-selection into employment we implement a 3-step estimation (TSE) procedure suggested by Wooldridge, which deliver consistent and asymptotically normal estimators. We find a large and statistically significant causal effect of EAL on the wage gap.

KEYWORDS:

• English as Additional Language (EAL)
• wage gap
• endogenous treatment
• sample selection

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J15
• J31
• J61
• C21

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jagjit Chadha, Antonio Di Paolo, Massimiliano Bratti, Amanda Gosling, Colin Green, Kai Liu, Stephen Machin, Anna Vignoles, Maria De Paola, Kjell Salvanes, Pravin K. Trivedi, João Santos Silva, Stephen Pudney, Gauthier Lanot, and Susan W. Parker for comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

We use secondary data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), which is a longitudinal survey collected by ISER at Essex University, UK. The UKHLS has an Ethnicity Strand Advisory Committee, as well as a Scientific Advisory Committee, and complies with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ We perform robustness checks using different ages as threshold and find similar results.

Additional information

Funding

The present research was done with no funding support.