Intermarriage and the labour-force participation of immigrants: differences by gender

ABSTRACT

Studies of the impact of intermarriage on labour market outcomes of immigrants focus on labour-force participants. However, intermarriage itself can change participation options and heterogeneously so for men and women. Using data from the 2010 American Community Survey, we find that the raw impact of intermarriage is to reduce labour-force participation for men and increase it for women. However, upon controlling for observable and unobservable selection into intermarriage, the gains from intermarriage for women are reversed. The importance of human capital controls of education and experience in determining the labour-force participation of married immigrants is underscored. Birthplace fixed effects play an important role in explaining the gender differences in labour-force participation among intermarried immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour-force participation
• immigrants
• intermarriage
• gender

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J12
• J15
• J21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Due to space constraints, only coefficients on selected explanatory variables are shown.

² Those who arrived at ages below 13 are infant entrants. Teenage entrants arrived between 13 and 18 years of age. Young adult entrants arrived between the ages of 19 and 25, whereas anyone migrating above the age of 25 is an older adult entrant. Of course, all these individuals are constrained to taking their marital decisions post-migration.

³ Birthplace groupings are not single countries, rather country blocks. We create these blocks based on IPUMS groupings.