This paper studies the educational, employment, and income status of Vietnamese and Filipina brides of American citizens, based on the merged micro data of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 American Community Surveys. We found that the Vietnamese brides tended to be much less educated than the Filipina brides. This difference, together with the fact that the former tended to be much weaker in English language ability than the latter, contributed to (1) the finding that the Vietnamese brides had a lower employment rate than did the Filipina brides, and (2) the finding that the economic niche of the employed Vietnamese brides (in the salon sector) tended to yield substantially lower wages than did the economic niche of the employed Filipina brides (in the medical service sector). Since better-educated brides had a better chance to get married to better-educated husbands, we naturally found that the husbands of the Vietnamese brides tended to be less educated than the husbands of the Filipina brides. However, the gap in educational attainment between the two groups of husbands was substantially smaller than the corresponding gap between the two groups of the brides. Underlying this gender difference was the fact that in addition to educational status, beauty and pleasant personality were also important criteria for selecting wives, and the possibility that beauty and pleasant personality were not positively correlated with educational status. With respect to household income, the gap between the two groups of brides was not large, partly because of the strong tendency of the Vietnamese brides toward hypergamy. A nice finding was that both Filipina and Vietnamese wives of American citizens were at rather low risk of being in poverty. The rather negative images of foreign brides in higher-income Asian countries conveyed by many ethnographic studies have been countered by our more sanguine finding about the Vietnamese and Filipina brides in the United States. With respect to the idea that women in lower-income countries tend to accept hypogamy at the personal level in order to achieve hypergamy at the societal level, it was moderately supported by the Filipina cases butlargely negated by the Vietnamese cases.

Taiwan's fertility rates have decreased over the past three decades, making it one of the lowest-low fertility countries in the world. However, its homeownership rates exhibited an opposite trend, increasing during the same period. Are these two time series trends related or merely coincidental? Our empirical results reveal that fertility rates are co-integrated with homeownership rates, household income, proportion of married couples, and percentage of higher educated females, which means there exists a long-term equilibrium relationship among these variables. In the short-term, in addition to a significant negative autocorrelation, fertility rates were mostly affected by lagging household income and the percentage of more highly educated females, but the influence of lagging homeownership rates was not significant.

A growing number of individuals have postponed their first marriage and are currently single in Taiwan. This paper employs the Manpower Utilization Survey (MUS) during the period of 1982-2008 to investigate the connection between local marriage propensity and local labor market conditions. Our empirical results indicate that young women are more likely to get married in an area with a higher male employment rate and a lower female employment rate. Women tend to stay single longer when the labor market for women improves or the labor market for men worsens. These findings remain even after we adopt the instrument variable estimation to consider the potential endogeneity problem of local male or female employment rates in the settings.

Research on identity often takes place within one single space or scale. The regional differences, time scales and spatial scales of identity, however, are often ignored. From a regional identity perspective, people of diverse contexts form a complicated regional identity and a place symbol due to varied material and humanistic foundations. As time scales are concerned, how generation and individual life course affect identity formation is truly a black box. However, it is important to clarify how an individual of a specific generation transmits the meaning of time through his or her personal life embedded in a particular time and space. About spatial scales of identity, the horizons of individuals determine the sense of place and identity, and the horizons are affected by environmental perceptions. This paper fills this research gap. It also illustrates that such study should not be confined to the concept of unitary time-space. The aim is to explore how multiple scales work on identity and to attribute place identity to the complexity of horizontal spatiality and vertical generation. We suggest a generation concept containing both the time and space scales. This consideration is helpful for examining the multiplicity of place identity in dynamic generations (time) and areas (space).To understand the complicated process of identity formation, this paper uses qualitative interview and questionnaire results to solve the dialectical time-space concept of place identity and generation/life course. To differentiate place identity, we selected three communities in Kaohsiung City: (1) a fishing village in Chi-jin, (2) an upscale riverbank community in Sanmin, and (3) the Chinese Petroleum Corporation employee housing complex in Nanzih. The findings show that the experience of living situation influences people's horizons and scales of identity, so as to highlight the effect of time on place identity.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.