Empirical Essays on Economics and Language

Abstract

[eng] This thesis presents three essays on Economics and Language, in chapter 2, 3 and 4, with a previous general introduction and a final conclusión. In the first article (chapter 2), together with my advisor Antonio Di Paolo, we investigate the effects of geographical exposure to local language training centres in a bilingual urban labour market, the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, exploiting the implementation of a language policy that provided publicly subsidized language courses for adults. Our variable of interest consists in a measure of spatial availability of language schools that captures potential exposure and its expansion over time. First, we focus on the formation of local language skills, adopting a reduced-form approach. Our results indicate that exposure to language learning opportunities matters for language skills, since individuals residing in neighbourhoods with a higher supply of language centres are more likely to be able to speak and write in Catalan, the local language. The effect is quantitatively modest but very robust to falsification exercises and several sensitivity checks and is strongly heterogeneous in favour of younger individuals born in Catalonia with a low level of education. Second, we analyse whether accessibility to language centres also affects employment, working hours, employment sector, and occupation. The evidence regarding labour market outcomes is inconclusive, possibly due to the fact that the impact of geographical exposure on language skills is too small in size to improve performance in the local labour market. In the second article, I investigate the effect of competition on language diversity in a cultural market, the movies market, in which language is a relevant characteristic of the good. I analyse the case of the bilingual region of Catalonia to empirically test the effect of competition in two stages of the supply chain – the distribution and the exhibition – on the availability of films in the weaker language. I create a unique data set of all the screenings in the region over 10 months from different sources using advanced web-scraping techniques. I find that the concentration at the distribution level reduces the percentage of films in Catalan by 4.04 percentage points compared with the counterfactual of perfect competition. The effect of the concentration at the exhibition level is not significant. This implies that without such market failure, the total supply of films in Catalan would be 96% greater. I also look for heterogeneous effects disentangling two types of audiences: children-targeted films and adult targeted films. I find that children have higher preference intensity over the language because the market is more responsive to them; the concentration at the exhibition level matters when it comes to this type of consumer. In the third and last paper (chapter 4), I investigate the effect of the introduction of VoD platforms on the preferences for different language versions of movies. By using survey data gathered from 2014 to 2019 in the bilingual region of Catalonia (Spain), I explore whether the exposure to VoD affected the likelihood of preferring the Catalan, Spanish or original versions. I found a negative effect on the preference for Catalan and Spanish versions, although this was not significant in all the specifications. Regarding the impact of VoD exposure on the preference for original versions, I identified a positive, significant and very robust effect in all the specifications. The effect is heterogeneous and varies depending on an individual’s language, education level and age. These results prove that people adapt their preferences to what they experience, so the introduction of a new technology into a market (in the case of this paper, the movie market) can rapidly change the preferences of consumers, who accustom, or accommodate, their preferences to the new paradigm.