Economic incentives for language acquisition

This chapter reviews the literature on language proficiency and the economic incentives that potentially lead individuals to invest in the acquisition of language skills. The aim is to understand whether (and to what extent do) individuals respond to economic incentives to acquire non.native language skills. The empirical literature is limited and only provides indirect evidence on the impact of economic incentives. This chapter suggests that this is due to difficulties in locating variables capturing economic incentives, and the appropriate empirical methodology that would help identify the marginal effect of economic incentives on language acquisition, controlling for other determinants. We describe possible reasons behind this challenge along with a first reflection on strategies to better assess the impact of economic incentives.