This paper investigates the effect of a native spouse on the transitions into and out of entrepreneurship of male immigrants in the U.S. We find that those married to a native are less likely to start up a business compared to those married to an immigrant. This finding is robust when the endogeneity of being married to a native is taken into account. We also show that immigrants married to a native are significantly less likely to exit from entrepreneurship compared to their counterparts who are married to an immigrant. Our results point to an interesting asymmetric role of being intermarried in deciding to become an entrepreneur and for survival in entrepreneurship, which is consistent with a network effect. On the one hand, intermarriage reduces the chance of starting up a business possibly because better access to local networks can help transitions into other forms of employment (e.g. paid employment). On the other hand, superior access to local networks through marriage to a native spouse facilitates business survival.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
4350.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.