Citation:
Bordalo, Pedro, Marco Tabellini, and David Yang. "Stereotypes and Politics." Working Paper, 2019. View Details|
Working Paper HBS Working Paper Series 2019 Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage and Fertility |
Abstract
In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants’ location decision by interacting national changes in migration flows across ethnic groups with pre-existing immigrants’ enclaves across U.S. cities, we find that immigration raised marriage rates and the probability of having children for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men’s employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of “marriageable men.” We explore alternative mechanisms—changes in sex ratios, natives’ cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment—and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.
Keywords: Immigration; Demography; Urban Scope; Household; Employment; History; Outcome or Result; United States;
Citation:
Carlana, Michela, and Marco Tabellini. "Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage and Fertility." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-004, July 2018. (Revised March 2019. Winner of European Economic Association Young Economist Award, 2018. IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) Discussion Paper Series, No. 11467, April 2018)
