Intergenerational Transmission of Culture Among Second-and-Higher Generation Immigrants: the Case of Age at First Birth and Nonmarital Childbirth

Hamid Noghanibehambari (), Nahid Tavassoli () and Farzaneh Noghani ()
Additional contact information
Hamid Noghanibehambari: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nahid Tavassoli: University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Farzaneh Noghani: University of Houston-Clear Lake

Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, 2023, vol. 6, issue 1, No 1, 18 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper uses immigration to investigate the intergenerational transmission of culture. The culture is proxied by nonmarital fertility and age at the first birth in the immigrant’s home country. Using the Current Population Survey, Censuses, and American Community Survey data covering the years 1970–2020, we find that average outcomes in the home country can explain a statistically significant portion of immigrants’ behavior. Furthermore, we rule out the influence of confounders by including a rich set of demographic and socioeconomic familial controls, other important home country characteristics, as well as state-by-year fixed effects. We find that a one-percentage-point increase in nonmarital fertility rate in the mother’s country of birth is associated with an 8.7 basis-point increase in the likelihood of nonmarital birth among second-generation women. Similarly, a one-year increase in age at first birth in the mother’s birthplace is associated with 0.37 years increase in age at first birth among second generations. The results show that there are cultural factors associated with nonmarital fertility and age at the first birth that can be transmitted from one generation to the next.

Keywords: Culture; Immigration; Nonmarital fertility; Family economics; Age at first birth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D91 J12 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41996-022-00103-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:joerap:v:6:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s41996-022-00103-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... policy/journal/41996

DOI: 10.1007/s41996-022-00103-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy is currently edited by Gary A. Hoover

More articles in Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().