How Interethnic Marriages Affect the Educational Attainment of Children: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

The allocation of Moluccan immigrants across towns and villages at arrival in the Netherlands and the subsequent formation of interethnic marriages resemble a natural experiment. The exogenous variation in marriage formation allows us to estimate the causal effect of interethnic marriages on the educational attainment of children from such marriages. We find that children from Moluccan fathers and native mothers have a higher educational attainment than children from ethnic homogeneous Moluccan couples or children from a Moluccan mother and a native father.interethnic marriages, educational attainment

Education and Health: The Role of Cognitive Ability

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data come from a Dutch cohort born around 1940, including detailed measures of cognitive ability and family background at age 12. The data are subsequently linked to the mortality register 1995-2011, such that we observe mortality between ages 55 and 75. The results suggest that the treatment effect of education (i.e. the effect of entering secondary school as opposed to leaving school after primary education) is positive and amounts to a 4 years gain in life expectancy, on average. Decomposition results suggest that the raw survival differences between educational groups are about equally split between a 'treatment effect' of education, and a 'selection effect' on basis of cognitive ability and family background

Unequal changes on the transitional labour market, the case of the Netherlands.

The emergence of a transitional labour market offers new opportunities to workers, but at the same time bears the risk of (new) inequalities. This paper deals with unequal chances on the transitional labour market in the Netherlands, in particular for workers from the four largest immigrant groups: Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese and Antilleans. The data used are from the SPVA, the survey `Social Position and Use of Public Utilities by Migrants' for the years 1998 and 2002. These are based on stock sampling. Since for some individuals labour market transitions occur at a very low rate, these individuals may stay in their current state till they reach the retirement age of 65. We estimate hazard rate models that account for both the stock-sampling and the possible maximum duration for the transitions from unemployment, household care and disability to employment. Then we decompose the difference in expected duration between the immigrant groups and the Dutch into the contribution of differences in observable characteristics, coefficient estimates and baseline hazard parameters. The main results of the analyses are that unequal chances exist, but to a different degree for the various groups and with variations per transition type

Immigrant gender convergence in education and on the labor market

Immigration tends to have a mitigating effect on the socioeconomic gender gap among immigrants. To explain this finding, we propose a gender convergence hypothesis that states that migration to a modern ‘open’ society offers women the opportunity to improve their position relative to that of men. In such a society, there are (almost) equal chances to participate in education and paid labor. The equalizing effect will be larger if the immigrants come from less developed regions, since women then have more room to improve their position. However, there may also be countervailing cultural powers within the immigrant group. The gender convergence hypothesis proposed here is tested for immigrants in the Netherlands. Using survey data, we investigate the educational and labor market position of Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, and Antillean males and females. We find convergent trends, particularly among Moroccan immigrants who come from less developed regions in their country of origin and who meet less cultural in-group barriers than, for example, Turkish immigrants