Seminario di Giulia Tura

ore 12.30 Sala Seminari – I° piano, Palazzo Levi Cases, Via del Santo 33

24.10.2017

Culture and Legal Status Trade-offs in Marriage Markets
with Jerome Adda and Paolo Pinotti

Seminario di Giulia Tura, European University Institute.

Intermarriages between immigrants and natives are deeply transforming family structures in immigrants’ destination countries. We relate intermarriage formation to cultural distance between spouses and legal status acquisition motives in the context of a marital matching framework. We empirically estimate the effect of legal status acquisition on gains to intermarriage exploiting registry data on the universe of marriages in Italy and exogenous variation in immigrants’ legal status, as determined by the EU enlargement process. Other things equal, access to legal status in Italy reduces the surplus of intermarriages between Italian males (females) and new EU citizens by 73 percent (90 percent). Building on this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate an equilibrium matching model allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other spouses’ socio-economic characteristics. Counterfactual analysis provides important insights regarding how country specific visa programs would affect the marriage patterns and how would marriage patterns change if we close the cultural-linguistic gap.