TY  - BOOK
AU  - Brock,William
AU  - Chen,Bo
AU  - Durlauf,Steven N.
AU  - Weber,Shlomo
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me: Levels of Majority Language Acquisition by Minority Language Speakers 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2022///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
KW  - Noncooperative Games
KW  - jelc
KW  - Allocative Efficiency • Cost–Benefit Analysis
KW  - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants • Non-labor Discrimination
KW  - Economic Sociology • Economic Anthropology • Language • Social and Economic Stratification
N1  - August 2022; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority groups choose whether to acquire a majority language fully, partially, or not at all. Different acquisition decisions confer different communicative benefits and incur different costs. We offer an equilibrium characterization of language acquisition strategies and find that partial acquisition can arise as an equilibrium behavior. We also show that a language equilibrium may exhibit insufficient learning relative to the social optimum. In addition, we provide a local stability analysis of steady state language equilibria. Finally, we discuss econometric implementation of the language acquisition model and establish identification conditions
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w30410
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w30410
ER  -