Elaine Liu "A Foreign Affair: Fertility and Divorce Responses of Local Women Due to the Influx of Foreign Brides"

时间：2011-12-05

应用经济学报告系列 (1112-15)

题目：A Foreign Affair: Fertility and Divorce Responses of Local Women Due to the Influx of Foreign Brides
报告人：Elaine Liu, University of Houston
时间：2:00-3:30pm, December 9
地点：成人直播新楼215教室

Abstract:
In recent years, the bride in one out of every 5 Taiwanese marriages have been non-Taiwanese. Many of these cross borders marriages involve a commercial marriage broker arranging for a foreign bride to enter Taiwan from China, Vietnam or Indonesia. In the wake of this massive influx of foreign brides, local women may be displaced and the intrahousehold bargaining power may shift toward married men who, after getting a divorce, may now easily re-marry a foreign bride. This paper first describes the foreign bride phenomenon in Taiwan, and then examines the impact of this massive influx of foreign brides on the fertility and divorce pattern of local married women. Our dataset consists of the universe of all marriages, divorces and the subsequent birth records between 1998-2006 in Taiwan. We use regional and time variation of the foreign brides share in a town to examine the impact of foreign bride share on the duration of marriages and fertility outcomes of Taiwanese women. To address the endogeneity problem, we use difference-in-differences technique. We examine the change in local women’s fertility pattern before and after 2003 when government started to restrict the entry of foreign brides. The policy ought to have a greater impact in areas with high foreign-bride demand. We find that the influx of foreign brides does not have any impact on divorce rates of local women, but it affects local women’s fertility decision.