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 com-paring 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.

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Shadi Farahzadi

5 December 2024     Paper Number CEPDP2059

Download PDF - The integration penalty: Impact of 9/11 on the Muslim marriage market

This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Labour markets programme.