Crime and Partnerships

This paper tests whether being convicted of a crime a¤ects marriage market outcomes. While it is relatively well documented that crime hurts in terms of reduced future income, there has been little systematic analysis on the association between crime and marriage market outcomes. This paper exploits a detailed Danish register-based data set to …ll this gap in the literature. The main …ndings are that male convicts do not face lower transition rates into partnerships as such, but they face a lower chance of forming partnerships with females from more well-o¤ families. In addition males who are convicted face a signi…cantly higher dissolution risk than their law abiding counterparts. Keywords: Crime, Marriage, Divorce. Classi…cation-JEL: J12 Acknowledgement: I am grateful to the Rockwool Research Foundation for …nancing this project. I thank Duy Thanh Huynh and Peter Fallesen for making the data available; Ulla Nørskov Nielsen for very competent research assistance; seminar participants at Tilburg University and Centre for Applied Microeconometrics, Copenhagen and in particular Anna Piil Damm, Susuma Imai, Lars Pico Geerdsen, Torben Tranæs, and Rune Vejlin for very useful comments. I am also grateful to Birgitte Højklint for reading the manuscript.