Fertility, Health and Education of UK Immigrants: The Role of English Language Skills*†

This paper aims to identify the causal effects of English language skills on fertility, health and education outcomes of immigrants in England and Wales. To identify the causal effects, we use the instrumental variable estimation strategy where age at arrival in the United Kingdom (UK) is exploited to construct an instrument for language skills. The idea of exploiting age at arrival is based on the phenomenon that a person who is exposed to a new language within the critical period of language acquisition (i.e., childhood) learns the language easily. This implies that immigrants who arrive in the UK at a young age will have on average better English language skills than those who arrive when they are older. Using a unique individual-level dataset that links census and life event records for the population living in England and Wales at the 2011 Census, we find that better English language skills significantly delay the age at which women have their first child, lower the likelihood of becoming a teenage mother, decrease the number of children a woman has, but do not affect child’s birthweight and self-reported health. The impact on educational achievement is also considerable: better English skills significantly raise the probability of obtaining post-compulsory qualifications and academic degrees and significantly lower the probability of having no qualifications or only compulsory level qualifications.