Migration

This paper analyses the marriage decisions of natives and migrants focusing on the role of legal status  and cultural distance. We exploit a natural experiment, the successive enlargements of the European Union, that shifted the incentives of some groups of foreigners to marry natives. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of marriages and separations, we show that it profoundly changed the composition of mixed marriages. Access to legal status reduces by half the probability of immigrants intermarrying with natives. Building on this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a multidimensional equilibrium model of marriage and separation allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other socio-economic spousal characteristics, where individuals match on observed and unobserved characteristics. We quantify the role of legal status and the strength of cultural affinity and show how it relates to linguistic, religious or genetic distance.

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model where individuals differ in ability and location preference to evaluate the mechanisms that affect the evolution of immigrants’ careers in conjunction with their re-migration plans. Our analysis highlights a novel form of selective return migration where those who plan to stay longer invest more into skill acquisition, with important implications for the assessment of immigrants’ career paths and the estimation of their earnings profiles. Our study also explains the willingness of immigrants to accept jobs at wages that seem unacceptable to natives. Finally, our model provides important insight for the design of migration policies, showing that policies which initially restrict residence or condition residence on achievement shape not only immigrants’ career profiles through their impact on human capital investment but also determine the selection of arrivals and leavers.