Social Contacts, Dutch Language Proficiency and Immigrant Economic Performance in the Netherlands: A Longitudinal Study

Using longitudinal data on immigrants in the Netherlands for the years 1991, 1994, 1998, 2002, we examined the impacts of social contacts and Dutch language proficiency on adult foreign-born men's earnings, employment and occupational status. The main conclusions are as follows. On average, social contacts and a good mastery of the Dutch language enhance immigrants' economic performances. The effects are stronger for immigrants with low-skill-transferability than for immigrants with high-skill-transferability, and are stronger for economic migrants than for non-economic migrants. Contact with Dutch people and Dutch organisations unambiguously enhances all aspects of immigrants' economic performance, however, we found no evidence for the positive effect of co-ethnic contact on employment status

Social Contacts, Dutch Language Proficiency and Immigrant Economic Performance in the Netherlands

Using longitudinal data on immigrants in the Netherlands for the years 1991, 1994, 1998, 2002, we examined the impacts of social contacts and Dutch language proficiency on adult foreign-born men’s earnings, employment and occupational status. The main conclusions are as follows. On average, social contacts and a good mastery of the Dutch language enhance immigrants’ economic performances. The effects are stronger for immigrants with low-skilltransferability than for immigrants with high-skill-transferability, and are stronger for economic migrants than for non-economic migrants. Contact with Dutch people and Dutch organisations unambiguously enhances all aspects of immigrants’ economic performance, however, we found no evidence for the positive effect of co-ethnic contact on employment status

Personalized Recommendation for Balancing Content Generation and Usage on Two-Sided Entertainment Platforms

Online entertainment platforms such as Youtube host a vast amount of user-generated content (UGC). The unique feature of two-sided UGC entertainment platforms is that creators’ content generation and users’ content usage can influence each other. However, traditional recommender systems often emphasize content usage but ignore content generation, leading to a misalignment between these two goals. To address the challenge, this paper proposes a prescriptive uplift framework to balance content generation and usage through personalized recommendations. Specifically, we first predict the heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) of recommended contents on creators’ content generation and users’ content usage, then consider these two predicted HTEs simultaneously in an optimization model to determine the recommended contents for each user. Using a large-scale real-world dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed recommendation method better balances content generation and usage and brings a 42% increase in participants’ activity compared to existing benchmark methods

Barriers of culture, networks, and language in international migration: a review

Along with the increasing pace of globalization, recent decades faced a dramatically increase in international migrant flows as well. Compared to the flows of trade, capital and knowledge, we observe that contemporaneous complex institutional differences, historical backgrounds, and individuals' diverse socio-demographic characteristics make the migrant workers' choice of destination arguably much more uncontrollable. This study shows that migration is in a complex way intertwined with culture, networks and language, (i) by reviewing related studies on the barriers of culture, networks and language in international labor mobility, and (ii) by exploring missing gaps and prospective avenues for research. Nowadays, the migration pressure on Europe and the United states has created substantial challenges, leading to an urgent need to address the economic assimilation and social integration of migrants. Against this background, we emphasize that these non-economic factors have played an increasingly critical role in shaping international migration and its future socio-economic consequences for destination countries

Look Who’s Talking: On the Heterogeneous Returns to Foreign Language Use at Work among Natives and Migrants in Europe

We examine the heterogeneous impacts of foreign language use at work on earnings of both native-born workers and foreign-born workers, using a longitudinal survey, viz. the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) running from 1994 to 2001. Our findings are the following. First, for native-born workers with a tertiary diploma, using a foreign language at work is found to have an unambiguously positive impact on their earnings (2% on average). Second, for foreign-born workers, returns to foreign language use at work is highly complementary to education. Foreign language users below the upper secondary educational level earn significantly less (¡8%) than those who use the local language at work. Third, with regard to language types, a linguistically distant foreign language gives native-born workers the highest wage premium, while the use of EU official languages pays off the most for foreign-born workers. Fourth, our results do not show evidence that the lack of local language knowledge of low-educated migrants causes these results, as immigrants for whom themother tongue is similar to the local language show a similar pattern