This paper examines whether an important cultural institution in India - dowry - can enable male migration by increasing the liquidity available to young men after marriage. We hypothesize that one cost of migration is the disruption of traditional elderly support structures, where sons live...

In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants’ location decision by interacting pre-existing ethnic settlements with aggregate migration flows, we find that immigration...

Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper...

Immigrants who marry outside of their ethnicity tend to have better economic outcomes than those who marry within ethnicity. It is difficult, however, to interpret this relationship because individuals with stronger preferences for ethnic endogamy are likely to differ in unobserved ways from...

I present a theory of couples' job search whereby women sort into lower-paying geographically-dispersed occupations due to expectations of future spouses' geographically-clustered occupations and (thereby) inability to relocate for work. Results confirm men segregate into...

This paper examines the effects of education on intermarriage, and specifically whether the mechanisms through which education affects intermarriage differ by immigrant generation, age at arrival, and race. We consider three main paths through which education affects marriage choice. First,...

In the presence of asymmetric information, allocations can only be coordinated to the extent that each can be monitored, and household decision-making may not be fully cooperative. Because this information problem is particularly acute when individuals are not co-resident, I examine households...

In most countries, men are the principal asylum applicants, while women are admitted through family-reunification procedures. Family reunification implies that women's residence permits are contingent on remaining married to their husbands. Using a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID)...

We investigate the divorce patterns among non‐Western immigrants and natives in Denmark. We focus on marriages entered on or after arrival to Denmark and analyze whether inter‐ethnic marriages result in higher divorce rates and whether divorce behavior differs between first- and...

Despite a longstanding belief that education importantly affects the process of immigrant assimilation, little is known about the relative importance of different mechanisms linking these two processes. This paper explores this issue through an examination of the effects of human capital on one...