English Skills and Wages in a Non-English Speaking Country: Findings from Online Advertisements in Mexico.

In spite of the generally accepted status of English as a lingua franca, the labor market returns to English for its role as an international language are relatively understudied. In this paper, advertisements from Computrabajo.com.mx, a website posting job advertisements in Mexico, are used to estimate the impact speaking English has on wages in Mexico. The wage premium for English speakers is found to be approximately 28 percent (over non-English speakers) for the sample as a whole. This premium is comparable to the wage premium associated with having a college degree (compared to having an incomplete college education). The evidence found in this paper suggests that English may provide a path to upward economic mobility in Mexico, and that this holds true for persons of all skill levels. In fact, estimated wage premia for English were higher for jobs with lower skill or education requirements than for jobs with higher skill or education requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]