Working Paper: NBER ID: w30410
Authors: William Brock; Bo Chen; Steven N. Durlauf; Shlomo Weber
Abstract: Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority groups choose whether to acquire a majority language fully, partially, or not at all. Different acquisition decisions confer different communicative benefits and incur different costs. We offer an equilibrium characterization of language acquisition strategies and find that partial acquisition can arise as an equilibrium behavior. We also show that a language equilibrium may exhibit insufficient learning relative to the social optimum. In addition, we provide a local stability analysis of steady state language equilibria. Finally, we discuss econometric implementation of the language acquisition model and establish identification conditions.
Keywords: language acquisition; minority languages; majority languages; immigration; equilibrium
JEL Codes: C72; D61; J15; Z13
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| higher costs of full language acquisition (J32) | increase in the number of partial learners (I24) |
| language equilibrium (D50) | insufficient learning relative to the social optimum (D89) |
| dynamics of language acquisition (C69) | varying steady-state configurations (C62) |