Cross-Nativity Marriages and Human Capital Levels of Children

Delia Furtado

No 3931, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A common perception about immigrant assimilation is that association with natives necessarily speeds the process by which immigrants become indistinguishable from natives. Using 2000 Census data, this paper casts doubt on this presumption by examining the effect of an immigrant's marriage to a native, a measure of social integration, on dropout rates of children from these marriages. Although second-generation immigrants with one native parent generally have lower dropout rates than those with two foreign-born parents, the relationship reverses when steps are taken to control for observable and unobservable background characteristics. That is, immigrants that marry natives have children that are more likely to dropout of high school than immigrants that marry other immigrants. Moreover, gender differences in the effect of marriage to a native disappear in specifications which control for the endogeneity of the marriage decision.

Keywords: intermarriage; immigration; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J61 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hap, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Published - published in: Research in Labor Economics, 2009, 29, 273 - 296

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3931.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Cross-nativity marriages and human capital levels of children (2009)
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:iza:izadps:dp3931

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().