including grant support received from the Troesh Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
I compare mixed-citizenship couple formation under an immigration policy granting spousal visas to one without spousal visas, by leveraging federal same-sex marriage recognition from ending the Defense of Marriage Act. I estimate changes in mixed-citizenship same-sex couple counts and marriage counts, accounting for changes in other same-sex and other mixed-citizenship couples, using a triple difference design. Spousal visa access increases mixed-citizenship coupling by 36%, and mixed-citizenship marriages by 78%. Transfer benefits, health insurance, roommates, moving, or state-level heterogeneity do not explain the results. Informal calculations suggest 1.5 million people are currently together thanks to spousal visas.
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