Working Papers

Migration for Marriage [PDF] [SSRN]Submitted
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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.


Price of Integration: Evidence from Muslim Marriage Market - Email for the draft

September 11th terrorist attack generated a negative sentiment towards Muslims in the United States. The rise in bias and discrimination affected the economic and social aspects of Muslims' lives. The intermarriage market as an unregulated market provides the opportunity to estimate the consequences of this discrimination. Therefore, in this chapter, I focus on the effect of 9/11 on the Muslim intermarriage market.  I decompose the impact into an extensive margin (impact on intermarriage rate) and an intensive margin (impact on intermarriage prices). The Current Population Survey data is used for the estimation. Results indicate a decrease of approximately 10\% in the rate of Muslims marrying non-Muslims after 9/11. Before this, Muslims tended to marry partners of lower educational attainment, while non-Muslims tended to marry partners with higher educational attainment. However, after 9/11, this vertical ordering disappears, transitioning through a more horizontal disutility from mixing, suggesting an increase in the disutility of intermarriage among Muslims.

Works in Progress

Ethnic Segregation in Schools and Educational Attainment in the UK (Joint with Guy Michaels)

Graduating in a Recession: Impacts on Fertility and Persistence Across Generations (Joint with Patrick Bennet and Jessica Botros)

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]