Ali Demir

Ali Demir

PhD Candidate in Economics.

On the market for postdoctoral and research-oriented academic positions.

Research: migration, family, and labor economics.

Job Market Paper

German Internal Migration: A Marriage Market Perspective

This paper studies how female-biased East-to-West internal migration after German reunification affected marital stability in receiving West German districts. Using district-level panel data on divorce outcomes and migration exposure, I examine whether local marriage-market conditions changed in ways that altered divorce behavior.

Status: Job Market Paper
Fields: Migration Economics, Family Economics, Labor Economics, Applied Microeconomics

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Abstract

This paper investigates whether young, female-skewed East–West migration after German reunification altered marital stability in receiving West German districts. I construct district-year measures of cumulative exposure to young East German migrants, expressed in imputed young-female units and scaled by fixed pre-treatment population, and relate this exposure to district-level divorce rates. To address endogenous migrant sorting, I use a historical-share-by-push instrument that interacts pre-reunification East-linked settlement shares with a cumulative female-weighted East German labor-market push component. The preferred IV estimates show that districts with greater predicted exposure experienced lower post-reunification divorce rates after conditioning on state-year shocks and predetermined district characteristics. The evidence supports a stabilizing relationship between predicted young East–West migration exposure and divorce rates in receiving districts, while the mechanism evidence does not isolate a purely female-specific or unilateral filing channel.

Keywords: Migration, divorce, sex ratio, Germany
JEL Codes: J12, J61, R23, D10

Research Question

How did female-biased East-to-West internal migration after German reunification affect divorce outcomes in receiving West German districts?

Main Finding

In the preferred controlled IV specification, districts with greater predicted exposure to young East–West migration, expressed in imputed young-female units, experienced lower post-reunification divorce rates. A one-standard-deviation increase in predicted exposure corresponds to roughly 0.26 fewer annual divorces per 1,000 residents, about 10 percent of the sample mean.

Interpretation

The pattern is directionally consistent with a receiving-market-availability mechanism, but the implied magnitude exceeds what net sex-ratio changes alone can explain, and the filing decomposition does not isolate a female-specific or unilateral channel: the clearest negative response appears in joint filings. The estimate is a local effect of predicted exposure and does not separately identify an effect of female migration alone.

Data and Design