Lunch Seminar Economics (LSE) - 2020/2021

Interviene: Elona Harka, Università degli studi di Bergamo 

Link: aula virtuale Teams (accedi qui) 

Abstract 

This paper investigates whether linguistic similarity to Standard Italian affects educational attainment and labor market outcomes, by exploiting unique micro linguistic data on dialects spoken at the beginning of the 20th century in 338 Italian municipalities. Adopting the view that, historically, dialects were the native language of the population and Standard Italian a “second” language, I advance the idea that historical dialects influence contemporary outcomes. Reduced form estimates, exploiting within province variation, show that linguistic similarity to Standard Italian is positively associated with present day educational outcomes and incidence of occupations intensive in language skills.