Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to examine empirically the role of home-country cultural heritage on employment decisions of the Southeast Asian marriage immigrants in Taiwan based on the probit model. The Epidemiological Approach is applied to the data from the 2003 “Survey of Foreign and Mainland Spouses’ Life Status” collected by Ministry of Interior, R.O.C. in our empirical analysis. We use female labor force participation rate in the country of ancestry as the measure of home-country cultural heritage, and also include control variables for family background, human and social capital, assimilation effect and other related variables. Our findings indicate that the cultural proxies of home-country female labor force participation rate are significant in explaining the variation in the country fixed effect and show a significantly positive effect on employment probability of the Southeast Asian marriage immigrants in Taiwan. Additionally, we examine the effect from residential status, the years since migration and ethnic density, even testing the robustness of our results by including the total fertility rate, GDP per capital and average women education level in the country of origin. Further, we tackle the issue with the consideration of Hofstede Dimensions of National Culture and attitudes towards working women in the labor market prevalent in a home-country society. The positive effect of home-country female labor force participation rate is very robust according to the various models estimated in this study. In general, a one percentage increase in the home-country female labor force participation rate is associated with a 16.50－37.10％ increase in the probability of working.