FES International Research Seminar with Professor Jérôme Adda, Bocconi University

This week the next speaker in the FES International Research Seminar Series was Professor Jérôme Adda, Bocconi University.

Professor Adda's research interests include Health Economics, Labor Economics and Macroeconomics. At the FES International Research Seminar professor presented joint research "Love, Ethnicity or Legal Status?  Natural Experiments in Marriage Markets". Jerome Adda with his co-authors raises the problem of marriages between immigrants and citizens of an immigration country. The seminar participants were so involved into the discussion, so that the speaker had to present his research paper almost two times. 

The abstract:
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 probability of intermarrying with native males by almost two-thirds for females from new EU countries, and similarly for males. Building on this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a multidimensional equilibrium model of marriage and divorce allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other socio-economic spouses' characteristics. The results suggest that immigrants are willing to trade off cultural proximity for legal status, and to marry down on other individual traits for that purpose.

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The FES International Research Seminar organisers are: Alexander Tarasov (HSE) and Levent Celik (HSE)