Migration and Marriage in the United States: Modeling the Joint Process

Bohyun Joy Jang, Ohio State University

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the current study investigates how migration and marriage in the United States are related to each other. Because many people experience both events multiple times, a discrete-time event history model with random effects is estimated for each event, capturing unmeasured person-specific determinants of the events. In estimating the relationships, however, selection effects may distort parameters for both equations. Therefore, the two equations of migration and marriage are simultaneously estimated with a correlation between residuals, which will account for possible endogeneity of each outcome in estimating its effect on another process. The findings suggest that models capturing event dependence produce coefficients different from those from models without endogeneity, which indicates significant interrelationships between migration and marriage.