Jerome Adda: There’s More to Marriage than Love: The Effect of Legal Status and Cultural Distance on Intermarriages and Separations.

Welcome to seminar with professor Jerome Adda, Bocconi.

Title: There’s More to Marriage than Love:  The Effect of Legal Status and Cultural Distance on Intermarriages and Separations.

Abstract:
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 and affected the stability of those 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, where individuals match on observed and unobserved characteristics. Allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other socio-economic spousal characteristics, we quantify the role of legal status and the strength of cultural affinity.  Through the evaluation of counterfactual policies, we show that granting legal status to migrants to foster integration through access to the legal labor market, paradoxically, slows down the integration of minorities along cultural lines. We also show how recent migration waves will foster a gender marital imbalance within those communities.