Ethnic Assortative Mating across Marriage Markets: Marital Choice for Muslim Chinese

Zheng Mu, University of Michigan
Xiwei Wu, Peking University

This paper addresses the question of how the marital choices of Muslim Chinese vary across ethnic marriage markets and how the marriage markets effects change with age. Specifically, we study Hui Muslim’s choices among being single, endogamy and exogamy and we measure conditions of local ethnic marriage market by two indicators – local ethnic concentrations of Hui and the local ethnic heterogeneity. We estimate discrete-time competing-risks models of marital choice outcomes, bases on a random sample of China 20051% inter-census survey. Census in 2000 will be used to calculate measures of local conditions for different marriage cohorts. We will also utilize qualitative analysis of 49 in-depth interviews on family and development conducted in Gansu , China in 2008.