Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives’ Marriage, and Fertility

Michela Carlana and Marco Tabellini ()
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Marco Tabellini: Harvard Business School, Business, Government and the International Economy Unit

No 19-004, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives' marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants' location decision by interacting national changes in migration flows across ethnic groups with pre-existing immigrants' enclaves across US cities, we find that immigration raised marriage rates and the probability of having children for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men's employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of "marriageable men". We also explore alternative mechanisms - changes in sex ratios, natives' cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment - and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.

JEL-codes: J12 J13 J61 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2018-07, Revised 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
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http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=19-004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage and Fertility (2020)
Working Paper: Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage, and Fertility (2018)
Working Paper: Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage, and Fertility (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:19-004

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