By Julie Lacroix, Júlia Mikolai and Hill Kulu
This paper investigates post-separation residential outcomes among immigrant, native, and immigrant-native mixed couples. Previous research shows that women are more likely than men to leave the family home upon separation indicating their weaker bargaining position. By distinguishing male and female partners by migrant origin, they consider how gendered power imbalances interact with migration status to create specific bargaining dynamics within households. They use Swiss administrative data and estimate multinomial logistic models for two post-separation residential mobility outcomes: who leaves the family home and to what distance this person relocates. They find that among immigrant-native mixed couples, the immigrant ex-partner (the man or the woman) is significantly more likely to move out of the joint home following a separation. The results suggest that migration status brings in a new dimension of bargaining within separating couples, which affects the gender-specific residential mobility outcomes reported in previous studies. While family migration decisions are generally biased toward the human capital of men, this study shows the advantage of the native partner in immigrant-native couples.