CORE Brown Bag Seminar

November 16, 2022

12:50 - 13:50

CORE - Room C035

Keiti KONDI (IRES)

will give a presentation on

Integration Vs Cultural Persistence: Fertility and Working Time among Second Generation Migrants in France

Abstract

We study how cultural norms in the origin country, measured at different times, affect fertility and labor force participation of second-generation migrant women in France. We apply the so-called epidemiological approach to test that the culture of origin affects people’s behavior and decisions, by using the dataset TeO (Trajectoires et Origines) on population diversity in France in 2008. We find that: 1) cultural norms affect people’s decisions, confirming the results of Fernandez and Fogli (2009) also for the French context, 2) the timing of the norm is crucial. Cultural norms that matter the most are those prevailing at the time of the interview, much more than those prevailing at the time of the end of their education or when the second-generation migrants were born. The later the norm is measured in time, the most powerful its effect, suggesting that the socialization of peers is more important than that of parents. The explanatory power of norms holds also when controlling for socio-economic characteristics such as age, siblings, education for both the respondent, spouse, and parents 3) the feeling of being French moderates the persistence of cultural norms differently for fertility and labor force participation, while the perceived feeling of being discriminated does not alter the persistence of the cultural norms.