Economics of minority groups: Labour-market returns and transmission of indigenous languages in Mexico
研究了墨西哥30多个土著群体中双语（西班牙语与土著语）的就业和工资回报，发现多数群体从保留土著语中获益，且语言的经济回报正向影响其代际传递。
• Employment and wage return to bilingualism is estimated for over 30 Mexican indigenous groups, and it is found that most groups benefit from maintaining the native language along Spanish. • Household transmission of indigenous languages from parents to children is positively connected to the employment benefits that these languages provide. • Employment benefits of bilingualism feature prominently in agriculture, but also at the higher end of the educational distribution. This study demonstrates a series of links between minority language skills, their economic return, and transmission across generations among Indigenous Mexican groups. We begin by estimating the differential in employment likelihood and wages between monolinguals of the dominant language (Spanish), relative to bilinguals who also know a local minority language. This effect of bilingualism on labour-market outcomes is identified using census and labour survey microdata and a matching procedure that ties individuals closely by ethnicity and socioeconomic cline. This enables us to separate language from ethnicity and reduce the bias driven by unobservable factors, compared to existing research. We find that, for indigenous Mexicans, retaining the minority language along with Spanish improves employment prospects, overturning earlier results. Next, we investigate whether languages that are associated with larger labour-market benefits are also more likely to be passed on from parents to children, using intergenerational microdata. We find this to be the case, even after a rich set of controls on socio-economic environment. The results support a view that even in the absence of institutional support, minority languages may sustain themselves over generations in an ecological niche supported by labour-market specialisation.