Interethnic marriages and economic assimilation of immigrants’, IZA Discussion Paper 1142

This paper examines the relationship between interethnic mar-riages 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 cap-ital accumulation of their partners; and the selection hypothesis, ac-cording to which the relationship between intermarriages and assimi-lation is spurious because intermarried immigrants are a selected sub-sample from the population of all married immigrants. These two hypotheses are analyzed within a model in which earnings of immi-grants 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 pre-mium obtained by the least squares completelly vanishes once we con-trol for the selection. I thank Michael Baker, Aloysius Siow, and seminar participants at the University of Toronto and the Canadian Economics Association meeting in Ottawa, 2003 for many useful comments. All errors are mine. I also thank William Greene for his assistance wit