Research · Working paper

The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents

Jeffrey Grogger, Andreas Steinmayr and Joachim Winter

NBER Working Paper 26719, 2020

DOINBER WP (PDF)
Map of Germany: share of workers speaking with a distinctive regional accent, by region.
Geographic distribution of speakers with distinctive regional accents (Figure 2). Grogger, Steinmayr and Winter (2020), NBER Working Paper 26719, Figure 2.

Abstract

Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.

Cite (BibTeX)
@techreport{Grogger2020wage,
  author      = {Grogger, Jeffrey and Steinmayr, Andreas and Winter, Joachim},
  title       = {{The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents}},
  institution = {National Bureau of Economic Research},
  type        = {NBER Working Paper},
  number      = {26719},
  year        = {2020},
  doi         = {10.3386/w26719}
}

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Earlier versions

  • CRC TRR 190 Discussion Paper No. 184 (2019)

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