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.
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author.
Notes
Nonmarital fertility differs substantially by race and ethnicity. In 2017, nonmarital fertility among whites, Hispanics, and blacks was 28.4, 52.1, and 69.4%, respectively (National Center for Health Statistics 2020).
For a review, refer to Kearney and Levine (2017).
In Appendix A, we show that the results are quite robust and similar to the main findings when we relax this assumption.
A list of home-country characteristics is provided in Appendix C.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
In the main results, we exclude observations in the Census-ACS sample that their ancestry refers to more than one country. In this appendix, we relax this restriction. We use the average value of ancestral counties in nonmarital fertility and age at first birth and include them for multiple-ancestral individuals. The results are reported in Appendix Table 8. The marginal effects are quite similar to those reported in the main results.
Appendix 2
The decision of women to delay parenthood or having a child out of marriage could be partially explained by their desired family size. This desired fertility and plan for family size could also contain some cultural heritage that can be transmitted from generation to generation. In this appendix, we control for this cultural aspect by adding home country fertility rates into our main regressions. We then replicate the results of Table 2 through Table 6. These replicated results are reported in Appendix Table 9 through Appendix Table 12. Compared to the main results, the coefficients drop slightly but remain statistically and economically significant.
Appendix 3
The following table reports the country-level characteristics of home countries used in the paper.
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Noghanibehambari, H., Tavassoli, N. & Noghani, F. Intergenerational Transmission of Culture Among Second-and-Higher Generation Immigrants: the Case of Age at First Birth and Nonmarital Childbirth. J Econ Race Policy 6, 1–18 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-022-00103-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-022-00103-x