Ancestry Culture and Female Employment—An Analysis Using Second-Generation Siblings

We study the importance of ancestry culture for female employment. To identify the separate importance of ancestry culture and institutions is difficult, as the factors are related to each other as well as to a host of potentially omitted factors. The epidemiological approach tries to separate culture and institutions by investigating outcomes of immigrants with different cultures living in the same institutional environment. We show that estimates from studies using this approach are likely to be biased upwards. Having access to very detailed registry data on the whole Norwegian population, we are able to rely on an extended epidemiological approach whereby we compare the outcomes of different sex, second-generation immigrant siblings. We find a robust effect of ancestry culture on female employment, but it is smaller than in previous studies.