Interethnic Marriages and Economic Assimilation of Immigrants

Jasmin Kantarevic

No 1142, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between interethnic marriages and economic assimilation among immigrants in the United States. Two competing hypotheses are evaluated: the productivity hypothesis, according to which immigrants married to native-born spouses assimilate faster than comparable immigrants married to foreign-born spouses because spouses play an integral role in the human capital accumulation of their partners; and the selection hypothesis, according to which the relationship between intermarriages and assimilation is spurious because intermarried immigrants are a selected subsample from the population of all married immigrants. These two hypotheses are analyzed within a model in which earnings of immigrants and their interethnic marital status are jointly determined. The empirical evidence favors the selection hypothesis. Non-intermarried immigrants tend to be negatively selected, and the intermarriage premium obtained by the least squares completely vanishes once we account for the selection.

Keywords: interethnic marriage; economic assimilation; self-selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2004-05
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

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