How Do Sex Ratios Affect Marriage and Labor Markets? Evidence from America's Second Generation

By Joshua D. Angrist. Social Science Research Network, 2002

645 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sex ratios, i.e., relative numbers of men and women, can affect marriage prospects, labor force participation, and other social and economic variables. But the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality. This paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous, i.e., to members of the same ethnic group. The empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage, and a large negative effect on female labor force participation. Perhaps surprisingly, the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios. Higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children. The empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12fb48d46bfc265a004b55b89642a8fddbee867c

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Citations in the corpus

Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China (2013, background): “Thepossibility of a link between sex ratios and education and labor market investments has received some attention in economics (Angrist, 2002; Lafortune, 2008).”
The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration (2012, background): “12If marriages are endogamous, such large changes in sex ratios might alter marriage market competition and subsequently affect out-migration [Angrist 2002].”
Investment in Schooling and the Marriage Market (2009, background): “10 (2) In marriage, women may be required to take care of the children; this would lower the schooling return for married women.”
Waiting for Mr. Right: Rising Inequality and Declining Marriage Rates (2003, neutral): “The inclusion of city fixed-effects could be considered an overly conservative identification strategy because we are throwing away all of the strong cross-sectional variation in marriage rates and inequality, as seen in Figure 1.10 10 See Hamermesh (2000) for a discussion of this issue.”
When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men (2017, background): “6 They also support Wilson’s observation that manufacturing contractions (4)The Shenhav (2016) analysis focuses on the economic independence of women rather than the declining marriagemarket value of men; it draws its empirical strategy in part on an earlier version of this paper (Autor et al., 2014”
Where Have All the Young Girls Gone? Identification of Sex Selection in India (2010, background): “…an unprecedented demographic squeeze with likely consequences for the prevalence of prostitution and sexually transmitted infections, crime and violence, labour markets and old-age care (Samuelson 1985, Angrist 2002, Hesketh and Zing 2006, Edlund et al. 2007, Ebenstein and Jennings 2009).”
Intermarriage, Language, and Economic Assimilation Process: A Case Study of France (2009, methodology): “Because intermarriage and high earnings capacities may both be determined by some unobservable characteristics, M is correlated with ε in equation (1).”
Making Yourself Attractive: Pre-Marital Investments and the Returns to Education in the Marriage Market (2012, methodology): “(5)While Angrist (2002) uses mothers ethnicity, I employ fathers ethnicity instead because in 1960 and 1970, only fathers ethnicity is reported when the father is foreign born. This is of little importance, however, because 95 percent of foreign born parents share a common country of birth. (6)An”
The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China (2009, background): “Several papers have explored the effects of a sex ratio imbalance on marriage prospects by gender and (female) labor market participation (e.g., Edlund 2001; Angrist 2002; Chiappori, Fortin, and Lacroix 2002).”