UB School of Economics research shows that bilingualism at school increases the returns to schooling

The 1983 reform that introduced bilingualism in Catalan schools increases the earnings return to each additional year of schooling, according to a recent study by Lorenzo Cappellari (Catholic University of Milan) and Antonio Di Paolo (University of Barcelona School of Economics). The authors exploits the implementation of the Language Normalization Act of 1983 –which established Catalan as a medium of instruction in primary and compulsory secondary schools alongside Spanish– in order to estimate for the first time the wage effect of bilingual education.

The results were published in the journal Economics of Education Review under the title “Bilingual schooling and earnings: Evidence from a language-in-education reform”. The study reveals positive earnings effects of bilingual schooling. According to Cappellari and Di Paolo, one year of bilingual education raises earnings by on average 1.4%. This operates through an increased earning capacity rather than through increased working time within the month, the authors explain. The study did not reveal any effects on employment or occupation.

While other articles have investigated the effects of this reform on Catalan proficiency and on feelings of Catalan identity, this is the first study to estimate its earnings effects. “The Catalan experience is especially interesting for our purposes”, Di Paolo admitted. “To the best of our knowledge, in other countries and regions where bilingual schooling exists, there is always the possibility of choosing between the monolingual and the bilingual system”, he explained. In this cases, it is “econometrically difficult to distinguish the real effect of bilingualism from the effects of other unobserved characteristics that may affect earnings”, Di Paolo said. “However, the universal coverage of the reform in Catalonia eliminates these issues”, he added.

The results of this research are in line with the evidence from Morocco and the Indian State of West Bengala, which suppressed French and English from education respectively.  In their cases, removing an additional language from the schooling system generated a wage penalty for the affected individuals.

In Catalonia, the earnings increase may reflect the development of cognitive skills fostered by bilingualism, the researchers suggest. Also, schools had to recruit more skilled teachers as a result of the Language Normalization Act, which could have increased the overall quality of education. On the other hand, it needs to be highlighted that in a bilingual labor market like Catalonia, being proficient in Catalan may give an advantage in the job search process. The authors also obtained higher effects of exposure to bilingualism at school for individuals of non-Catalan background (in terms of either parental origins or language) from a low parental background. Bilingualism at school reduced the wage gap between different language background, thus levelling the playing field in a bilingual labor market.

“Extrapolating our results to other bilingual regions, we can tentatively argue that introducing or fostering bilingualism at school would be beneficial for long-term labour market outcomes, especially when both languages are relevant in the labour market”, Di Paolo said. “Bilingual education has also important effects in terms of equality of opportunity, since it could help in improving the relative position of disadvantaged sociolinguistic groups who are likely to benefit more from such language-in-education reforms”, he added.

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