Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/20379 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 1142
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
interethnic marriage
economic assimilation
self-selection
JEL: 
J12
J61
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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