The integration penalty: impact of 9/11 on the Muslim marriage market

Major sociopolitical events can have lasting impacts on integration through changing marriage preferences. Marriage markets, due to their unregulated nature, both reflect and affect integration in society. I use 9/11 as a natural experiment that altered preferences for interethnic marriage without changing the demographic compositions. Using a difference-in-differences framework com-paring American Muslims to other ethnic minorities, I find that 9/11 reduced Muslim intermarriage rates by 8 percentage points, primarily through decreased marriages with White Americans. I develop a novel model that analyses how individuals trade-off between group identity and other partner characteristics in marriage decisions, providing a framework to compare intermarriage disutilities through compensating differentials in the marriage market. I find that barriers to intermarriage stem primarily from non-Muslim Americans rather than Muslims.