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Title: Essays on Immigration and the Family in Labor Economics

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: This dissertation comprises three essays contributing to the literatures on labor economics, the economics of immigration and the family, and economic history. The first chapter explores the socioeconomic causes and consequences of marriage among immigrants in the United States. The second chapter is a commentary on literature that attempts to quantify a causal impact of intermarriage on economic outcomes of immigrants. The third chapter serves as a guide for practitioners using supervised record linkage techniques for the imputation of missing data. The first and main chapter of this dissertation studies the United States in the early 20th century at a time of charged debates on immigration. Public opinion turned against immigrants who were perceived as low-skilled or not able or willing to assimilate. The debate culminated in drastic changes in immigration policy which restricted immigration into the country. In some respects, the political climates at the beginning of the last century and today resemble each other. I hope that the historical evidence presented in the first chapter can invite readers to reflect on issues of the present through the lens of the past and that this work can motivate other scholars to pursue reasearch that will shed greater light on the effects of immigration policies and family institutions on the behavior and life outcomes of individuals. I hope that this will bring broader per- spective and deeper understanding into issues at the forefront of the current intellectual and political debate such as family-based immigration and assimilation, income inequality and intergenerational mobility, and the influence of the family on women’s work and career choices. Chapter 1. Marital Segregation and the Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrants Descriptive evidence shows that while immigrants tend to marry endogamously, the ones who intermarry tend to have better economic outcomes. Although a small body of literature has examined this issue, there is still little understanding of the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, I investigate the relationship between marital segregation and the labor market outcomes of immigrants. I propose a Beckerian model of marriage which rationalizes an incentive to marry within one’s ethnic group by incorporating a tradeoff between ethnic similarity and socioeconomic status among potential spouses. The model bears four sets of hypotheses shedding light on patterns of selection into exogamous marriage, sorting in the marriage market, the intermarriage income gap, and comparative statics with respect to marriage market conditions, specifically the immigrant gender imbalance. I test the hypotheses from the model using complete count US census data from the first half of the twentieth century, leveraging the uniqueness of this historical setting in terms of richness of available data and quasi-random variation in marriage market conditions. The findings highlight that resolving the nature of the relationship between segregation in marital choices and individuals’ economic outcomes can have important implications for the study of inequality and the analysis and evaluation of family-based migration policies. Chapter 2. Intermarriage and Assimilation: Some Cautionary Remarks Does intermarriage improve economic outcomes of immigrants? A strand of the literature in labor economics has examined this question by employing instrumental variables research designs which exploit variation in marriage market conditions to control for endogeneity of individuals’ marital choices. In this paper, I discuss this literature and investigate whether the methodologies used in these studies can identify a causal effect of intermarriage on the economic assimilation of immigrants. I conclude that the empirical findings of this body of work should be interpreted with caution. I also point to promising research avenues building on the literature. Chapter 3. Supervised Learning Methods for Historical Record Linkage Scholars in various fields often need to link records from different datasets based on quasi- identifying information. In this article, I draw on a matching procedure based on a method of supervised classification suggested by Feigenbaum (2016). I suggest that the supervised technique can be formally mapped to a classical framework for data combination of fuzzy matching with im- perfect identifiers. I apply the procedure to link immigrant records in the 1930 and 1940 complete count US census databases. The article provides a hands-on guide for practitioners interested in applying surpervised learning methods for the execution and validation of their data matching task.

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Authors: Nocera, Noemi

Institution: University of Chicago

Department: Economics

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Pages: 1-125

Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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