Abstract
The effect of international marriage - a union between a country native and an immigrant - on social and family outcomes is endogenous due to the selection into marriage markets and non-random spousal choice. In this paper we use availability of cheap airline flights as region-specific instrumental variable that increased the probability of intermarriage in Europe. The two-stage least squares analysis applied to 1977–2006 IPUMS International Project Census micro data shows no significant difference in the family size or number of children between intermarried and same-nativity couples. However, it does reveal higher labor force participation rates and much lower marriage rates among mixed nationality couples.
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Notes
OECD Country Statistical Profiles (http://stats.oecd.org/).
UN Population Division, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision, September 2013.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2013). Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 revision (United Nations database, POP/dB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2013).
We also considered other instrumental variables that are specific to the European region, such as European Union (EU) membership, the Schengen travel agreement and the introduction of the Euro, and the results remain similar to those obtained here.
Minnesota Population Center. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International: Version 6.3 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014. (https://international.ipums.org/international/)
Data on the European Union and Eurozone membership status for the countries in my sample was collected from the official website of the European Union (http://europa.eu/).
Data on cheap flight routes following the deregulation was collected on airline and travel websites, primarily https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/ , http://www.easyjet.com/en , https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/transportation/budget-flights .
Control function (CF) is a method of dealing with endogenous independent variables, see Wooldridge (2015).
In OECD-25 countries, between 2006 and 2011, 6.8% of the population age 20 and over are cohabiting, versus 49.9% who are married and 15.2% that are single. (OECD Family Database, SF3.3: Cohabitation rate and prevalence of other forms of partnership)
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Thomas Hyclak and Mengcen Qian, as well as Keshar Ghimire, the participants of 41st Eastern Economic Association Meeting and Lehigh University Economics Seminars for their insightful comments.
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Ponomareva, E., Chou, SY. & Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy, A. Social and Economic Impacts of International Marriages in Europe. J Labor Res 39, 259–276 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-018-9267-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-018-9267-x