Abstract:

Our paper studies the effects of dialect-speaking on job characteristics of Dutch workers, in particular on their hourly wages. The unconditional difference in median hourly wages between standard Dutch speakers and dialect speakers is about 10.6% for males and 6.7% for females. If we take into account differences in personal characteristics and province fixed effects male dialect speakers earn 4.1% less while for females this is 2.8%. Using the geographic distance to Amsterdam as an instrumental variable to dialect-speaking, we find that male workers who speak a dialect earn 11.6% less while for female workers this is 1.6%. Our main conclusion is that for male workers there is a significant wage penalty of dialect-speaking while for female workers there is no significant difference.

This lecture is part of the Applied Microeconomics and Organization Seminar of the Department of Management and Micro-Economics and the Wednesday Evening Lecture Series within the IZO’s research project “Protecting the Weak. Entangled Processes of Framing, Institutionalization and Mobilization in East Asia” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

For more information see http://www.protectingtheweak.uni-frankfurt.de