Domestic Responses to Foreign Bride Competition

[pandabear]

http://www.sole-jole.org/13257.pdf

Abstract:

In recent years, one in five marriages in Taiwan was to a foreign bride, mainly from
China and Vietnam. In this paper we study the impact of foreign brides inflow on
the domestic marriage market. We find that an inflow of foreign brides raises fertility
and reduces the divorce risk of domestic couples. These results, we argue, are consis-
tent with a model of marriage in which men employ women to produce children but
women can shirk-- the penalty of which is divorce. From the threat of foreign bride
competition, women exert more effort, fertility increase and divorce risk declines. Our
dataset consists of the universe of all marriages, divorces and the subsequent birth
records between 1998-2006 in Taiwan. To address the endogeneity problem, we exploit
a policy change in 2004 which restricts the entry of Chinese brides. We find that every
10 percentage points increase in foreign bride share increases local women's probability
of having a child by 9.9 percentage points and decrease local women's probability of
divorce by 0.79 percentage points.

[Yohan]

As this interesting study mentions already in its introduction, the situation is similar in South Korea, Singapore and Japan.

It is a clearly observed trend that also Asian men are looking for a foreign wife, however it seems to me they prefer a woman of the same race.

It's not like Western men looking for an Asian wife, but more similar to Western men looking for a wife from Russia - just my opinion.