Jeronimo Cortina, Rodolfo de la Garza, and Pablo Pinto find, surprisingly, that the ability to speak both English and Spanish has a surprisingly small association with income among Hispanics in the U.S., with the association actually being negative for managerial jobs. They write,
These findings are troubling for several reasons. They suggest that the difference in earnings may be the consequence of discrimination in labor markets. Alternatively, it is plausible that lower wages may reflect the extent to which Spanish-speaking Latinos including those who are fluent in English, receive educational services of lower quality than Hispanics that speak English only only, and even non-Hispanic whites despite similar education attainment levels.
From a statistical perspective, this sort of analysis is interesting because it is of the “dog that didn’t bark” variety: not finding an expected effect, which implies that there must be something cancelling the underlying pattern (of better skills–in this case, bilinguilism–yielding higher incomes). The regressions control for a bunch of variables (education, sex, age, citizenship, region, and occupation category). I wouldn’t mind seeing an analysis using matching as well. It’s a challenging problem to think of causally, since the point is that they’re not simply estimating the causal estimate of biligual ability–they’re actually trying to demonstrate that the model has a omitted variables.
And, of course, …
Figures 1-4 could be combined into a grid of some sort, for example with the 5 categories of language speaking on one large axis, and the other devisions (occupation, education, etc) on the other. The info in Table 2 can also be incorporated into this set of plots.
All the regression tables should be presented as graphs (see, e.g., Figures 3 and 9 of this paper for some simple examples). And Table 9 should be a graph with education level on the x-axis. Also, Table 1 should be a graph. Actually, most of these variables are binary, so they can be summarized by proportions and histograms.
Although it is hard to believe that " I am getting less coz i know more".
But i think they did not mention abt the
1. No of managers who know both spanish and english
2. those mangers who know only spanish
If case 2 > case 1 then i will obviously think that there is something wrong survey.
Now abt the low wages…i can explain a situtation which handles this scenario perfectly…
Suppose i am a manager and I know only chinease. it means i will be dealing with only chinease clients. Since i am a chinease ihave better probablity of having a better relationship with other chinease people(or client). It means i am performing well so i have better profile.
we can put similar arguements for those who knows both of these.. they might have to see people which are not chinease and probably can not handle/manage the situation properly
This result is completely unsurprising to me. It has been my experience that bilingual Hispanics in the U.S. tend to have less fluency in English than Hispanics who are monolingual in English. Thus being bilingual has advantages at lower levels of income: one can supervise both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking employees, serve both types of customers in a retail setting, etc. But at the managerial level all communication takes place in English, so any factor associated with reduced fluency in English will also be associated with lower income and reduced opportunity for advancement.