Working Papers
Migration for Marriage [PDF] [SSRN] - Under Review
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Previous title: "Importing Love: Muslim Marriage Migration in the UK"
This paper received the Sir Alec Cairncross Prize for the best paper at the Annual Conference of the Scottish Economic Society (SES) 2024.
Policymakers are concerned about permanent migration and are enforcing policies to tighten it. Marriage migration, wherein citizens marry foreigners, stands out as a significant pathway to permanent residency in OECD countries, particularly among Muslim communities. Notably, about half of British Muslims marry someone from their ancestral country of origin. This trend could be rooted in the desire to marry within one’s ethnicity or faith (endogamy preferences) or a pathway to gain residency in a developed country (migration gains). To disentangle these factors, I develop a novel marriage matching model in which I embed the choice of marrying someone from the country of origin. I structurally estimate the model using data from UK Census 2011. I find that 80% of Muslim marriage migration is explained by their preference for endogamy, driven by the ease of finding partners who share the same ethnicity and religious background in the country of origin. Therefore, raising the costs of marriage migration by policymakers does not increase their integration through intermarriage; instead, it leads to a higher rate of singlehood among Muslims.
The Integration Penalty: Impact of 9/11 on the Muslim Marriage Market [CEP Discussion Paper] - Under Review
Major sociopolitical events can have lasting impacts on integration through changing marriage preferences. Marriage markets, due to their unregulated nature, both reflect and affect integration in society. I use 9/11 as a natural experiment that altered preferences for interethnic marriage without changing the demographic compositions. Using a difference-in-differences framework comparing American Muslims to other ethnic minorities, I find that 9/11 reduced Muslim intermarriage rates by 8 percentage points, primarily through decreased marriages with White Americans. I develop a novel model that analyses how individuals trade off between group identity and other partner characteristics in marriage decisions, providing a framework to compare intermarriage disutilities through compensating differentials in the marriage market. I find that barriers to intermarriage stem primarily from non-Muslim Americans rather than Muslims.
Works in Progress
Does school integration improve outcomes for ethnic minority students? (Joint with Guy Michaels)
We are hiring an RA for this project: Job Advert
Graduating in a Recession: Impacts on Fertility and Persistence Across Generations (Joint with Patrick Bennet and Jessica Botros)
Marriage Migration and Intergenerational Integration in France
Part of the Comprendre l'Intégration des Immigrés : Lever les Obstacles pour une Société plus Inclusive (CILOSI) project funded by French Ministry of Interior
Published Papers
Female Labor Participation in Iran: A Structural Model Estimation, 2020, Journal of Economics Studies, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 1-19 (with Mohammad Rahmati) [Link]