Relatrice: dott.ssa Mariagrazia Cavallo, University of Bristol

This paper studies the effect of language proficiency on Math achievement for ten-year-old second-generation immigrant children in the Italian primary school. Through an IV strategy that exploits the heterogeneity in birthdates and the variation in linguistic distances, we find that these children face a trade-off between learning Italian and learning Math. We show that this outcome is led by children with a non-Romance linguistic background, which does not allow to benefit from similarities to Italian. We provide suggestive evidence that this result arises from the existence of some indivisibility in the learning process, due to language proficiency thresholds that should be crossed in order to understand the classes. We verify that the trade-off arises when proficiency is below the threshold that is widely adopted to indicate a sufficient command of a language.