# metadata.dc.description[].value
Treballs Finals del Màster d'Economia, Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2018-2019, Tutor: Judit Vall Castello

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
This  paper  estimates  the  effect  of  legal  status  acquisition  motives  on intermarriage  decisions. The  analysis  exploits  the  situation  of  the  Spanish asylumsystem,  since  it  is  saturated  and  failing  to process the substantial inflow of the asylum claims. The limitations of the system raise concerns about whether  the  asylum  applicants  are  seeking  alternative  ways  to  acquire  their  legal  statusin  Spain,  as marrying Spanishcitizens, or Spanish  residents. The  number  of  asylum  applications  reflects  the number of asylum seekerswith legal status acquisition motives. We find that the number of submitted asylum applications  hasa  positive  and  statistically  significant  impact  on  the  number  of registered intermarriagesin  Spain  over  the  period  2008-2016.We estimatethat for every100  additional submitted applications, the number of intermarriages increases by 3.6%, on the provinciallevel.Thus, we show that intermarriages are driven by the legal status acquisition motives of the asylum seekers. The  estimated  impact  is  higher  when  we  consider  intermarriages  with specifically foreign  female partnersrelative  to  those  with  foreign  males.Our  baseline  results hold across  several  robustness checksand a placebo test.