Intermarriage, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Chin

This dissertation examines intermarriage across a strong institutionalized social boundary in China: hukou status. Hukou is a key status marker in contemporary China signaling both differences in life chances and social prestige. Conventional wisdom presumes that hukou intermarriage is rare. Using nationally representative data, I show that intermarriage by hukou origin status is surprisingly common and has grown steadily since 1985. Common explanations for trends and variation in intermarriage patterns, including men's and women's increased educational attainment and large increases in the availability of rural partners due to mass migration, fail to explain increases in hukou intermarriage. Increasing rural-urban economic inequality, however, is associated with increasing hukou intermarriage, but only for intermarriage between rural women and urban men, suggesting that the incentives of "marrying up" for rural women in times of high inequality may outweigh the costs of "marrying down" for urban men. I also show that administrative changes in the ease of hukou conversion play a large role in increased hukou intermarriage.;Hukou intermarriage and conversion processes vary substantially by gender. I show that hukou conversion and hukou intermarriage are gendered, intertwined mobility pathways. Hukou conversion for men is associated with slightly higher family income than hukou intermarriage for rural women. This is partially explained by the higher probability that men both convert and intermarry, whereas rural women more often intermarry without converting. However, the small absolute difference in the economic outcomes to hukou conversion for rural men and intermarriage for rural women are explained by the non-trivial fraction of intermarried women who do convert their own hukou prior to marriage.;Finally, I examine whether men and women who marry across hukou lines are exchanging other valuable traits on the marriage market to facilitate intermarriage. In particular, I show that highly educated rural hukou holders tend to marry urban hukou holders with low education. The exchange of hukou for education tends to be stronger when the social distance between groups is large. As hukou intermarriage has become more prevalent, the strength of status exchange has waned, suggesting the weakening of hukou boundaries in China.