The La Follette School takes no stand on policy issues; opinions expressed within these papers reflect the views of individual researchers and authors. Abstract This study uses repeated cross sections of individual level data from the Public Use Microdata Samples of the United States Census (PUMS) to examine the role of changing marriage market conditions in the decline in female marriage rates...

This paper examines the role of marriage as an institution for providing couples with the confidence to make long-term investments in their relationship. No-fault divorce has undermined the notion of marriage as a contract, thereby reducing the security offered by marriage and promoting opportunism by men. This has weakened the bargaining power of wives, both within marriage and when divorce oc...

Kierstead showed that every computable marriage problem has a computable matching under the assumption of computable expanding Hall condition and computable local finiteness for boys and girls. The strength of the marriage theorem reaches WKL0 or ACA0 if computable expanding Hall condition or computable local finiteness for girls is weakened. In contrast, the provability of the marriage theorem...

We document a negative association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage in the United States, controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences. Nonmarital childbearing does not appear to be driven by low expectations of future marriage. Rather, it tends to be an unexpected and unwanted event, whose effects on a woman's subsequent likelih...

This paper examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage. Using detailed data from rural Ethiopia, we Þnd ample evidence of assortative matching at marriage. Assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner. Sorting operates at a variety of levels — wealth, schooling, and work experience — that cannot be summarized into a single additive index. For Þrs...

We develop and estimate an empirical collective model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and family labor supply. Intrahousehold transfers arise endogenously as the transfers that clear the marriage market. The intra-household allocation can be recovered from observations on marriage decisions. Introducing the marriage market in the collective model allows us to independently es...

Widening gaps in marriage rates have received a great deal of attention in recent years, focusing on the availability of marriageable men in the local marriage market. At the same time, cohabitation has increased in prevalence, playing a role in declining marriage rates. This paper extends marriage market arguments to the formation of both cohabiting and marital unions, using contextual data at...

—This paper explores new roles that traditionally rural kinship networks organized around the marriage institution might play in improving labor market outcomes in urban Africa. Using new data from Kisumu, Kenya, and controlling for selection into marriage, we find that marriage significantly increases employment levels and incomes in our sample of migrants. At the same time, marriage increases...

This study draws from agenda-setting and issue priming theories to develop hypotheses about how state-level ballot propositions may affect presidential elections. We propose that ballot measures prime voters to evaluate candidates in terms of policy questions placed on their state ballot. We test if concerns about gay marriage in 2004 had greater salience for voters in states where proposals to...

Japan is one of few developed countries in which marriage and higher earning potential among women are negatively associated. As the proportion of births occurring outside of marriage remains low in Japan, fertility is still significantly influenced by marriage trends, which are in turn influenced by societal expectations regarding the marriageability of educated women. Previous studies have su...