Interethnic Marriages and Economic Assimilation of Immigrants

By Jasmin Kantarevic. Social Science Research Network, 2004

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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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45ace8aed7ece076ee21b8e5c6030e7c45e897d5