Group Size and Social Interaction: a Canada-US Comparison of Interracial Marriage

Feng Hou, John Myles, Christoph Schimmele and Zheng Wu

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: While black-white intermarriage is uncommon in the United States, blacks in Canada are just as likely to marry whites as to marry blacks. Asians, in contrast, are more likely to marry whites in the US than in Canada. We test the claim that high rates of interracial marriage are indicative of high levels of social integration against Peter Blau’s ‘macrostructural’ thesis that relative group size is the key to explaining differences in intermarriage rates across marriage markets. Using micro-data drawn from the American Community Survey and the Canadian Census, we demonstrate that the relative size of racial groups accounts for over two-thirds of the US-Canada difference in black-white unions and largely explains the cross-country difference in Asian-white unions. Under broadly similar social and economic conditions, a large enough difference in relative group size can become the predominant determinant of group differences in the prevalence of interracial unions.

Keywords: intermarriage; macrostructural theory; social integration; group size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2015-07-07, Revised 2015-07-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.clsrn.econ.ubc.ca/workingpapers/CLSRN%2 ... %20Hou%20et%20al.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ubc:clssrn:clsrn_admin-2015-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vivian Tran ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).