Most studies of racial intermarriage rely on the prevalence of intermarriage to measure the strength of group boundaries, without scrutinizing the nature of intermarriage pairings. Examination of intermarried couples' characteristics reveals (1) that intermarriages and endogamous marriages follow different patterns, and (2) that intermarriage pairings for some groups reflect a generalized racia...

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the United States. Analyses of census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy decreased from 1940 to 1960 but increased from 1960 to 2003. From 1960 to the early 1970s, increases in educational homogamy were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well-educated p...

Interethnic Marriages and their Economic Effects Immigrants who marry outside of their ethnicity tend to have better economic outcomes than those who marry within ethnicity. It is difficult, however, to interpret this relationship because individuals with stronger preferences for ethnic endogamy are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those with weaker preferences. To clarify some of the c...

Only 5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990, and the family-income premium for intermarried black males was 7 percent. This paper estimates the impact of the mating taboo, courting opportunities, and individual endowments on the black male marriage market. Results indicate that eliminating the mating taboo would raise the intermarriage rate from 5.5 to 64 percent, and do away ...

Marriage is amongst the biggest decisions in life. In general, there is a tendency towards assortative matching – people marry others who are relatively similar to themselves. Intermarriage between different social, religious and ethnic groups in most societies is relatively rare (Blossfeld and Timm 2003). Where it occurs, it is associated with more rapid assimilation (Meng and Gregory 2005). T...

Ethnic Intermarriage among Immigrants: Human Capital and Assortative Mating This paper analyzes the determinants of interethnic marriages among immigrants in the United States. The dependent variable is intermarriage across ethnic groups and the inclusion of the explanatory variables is justified by a simple rational choice economic model. A binomial logistic regression is estimated using data ...

We utilized all Spanish marriage records available at the municipality level from 2005–2007 to model spatial variations in intermarriage. constructed a regime zero-inflated Poisson and grouped-data probit model, with spatially lagged regressors, predict absolute relative presence of intermarriage between Spaniards migrants based on structural characteristics local markets their neighboring area...

Intermarriage plays a key role in stratification systems. Spousal resemblance reinforces social boundaries within and across generations, and the rules of intermarriage govern the ways that social mobility may occur. We examine intermarriage across social origin and education boundaries in the United States using data from the 1968-2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our evidence points to a p...