Job Market Paper
German Internal Migration: A Marriage Market Perspective
This paper examines whether young, female-skewed East–West migration after German reunification affected divorce rates in receiving West German districts. It connects migration and family economics using an original historical dataset and a shift-share instrumental-variable design.
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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.
Research Question
Did exposure to female-skewed East–West migration after German reunification affect divorce rates 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.
This finding concerns predicted migration exposure in the preferred specification. It does not separately identify the effect of female migration alone, and the filing-side evidence does not isolate a particular marriage-market mechanism.
Data contribution
I assembled divorce, migration and population statistics from historical state statistical publications, digitised partly non-machine-readable sources, and harmonised the data to stable district boundaries. The resulting panel makes it possible to study receiving regions before and after reunification.