This article investigates the determinants of kin marriage on the basis of a large-scale database covering a major rural part of The Netherlands during the period 1840-1922. We studied three types of kin marriage: first cousin marriage, deceased spouse's sibling marriage, and sibling set exchange marriage. Almost 2% of all marriages were between first cousins, 0.85% concerned the sibling of a f...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar abundance of singles with relatively high marriage propensities. We compute the equilibrium response, in a...

The paper integrates marriage matching with the collective model of spousal labor supplies with full risk sharing. It derives observable implications of how marriage market conditions a¤ect spousal labor supplies. In addition to sex ratio which is an indirect measure, it provides a direct measure of changes in marriage market conditions. The framework also clari…es the identifying assumptions n...

We develop and estimate an empirical collective matching model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and labor supply decisions. The sharing rule in our collective matching model arises endogenously as a transfer that clears the marriage market. With information on at least two independent marriage markets, incorporating matching in the collective model allows us to identify the sh...

The United States shows striking racial and ethnic differences in marriage patterns. Compared to both white and Hispanic women, black women marry later in life, are less likely to marry at all, and have higher rates of marital instability. Kelly Raley, Megan Sweeney, and Danielle Wondra begin by reviewing common explanations for these differences, which first gained momentum in the 1960s (thoug...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the influence of adolescent marriage opportunities on female schooling attainment and gives predictions of the impact for imposing universal age-of-consent laws. Using data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the commonly cited hypotheses that women attain less schooling as a result of social and financial pressure to marry young. We isolate the causal ef...

Applying discrete-time hazard models to person-year data constructed from 1% microdata sample of 2010 Korean Census, we explore how men's education affects their transition to first marriage, and how the relationship between education and marriage has changed across three 10-year birth cohorts of Korean men born from 1946 to 1975. Drawing on Oppenheimer's theory of marriage and review of changi...

In this study we analyze transitions to first marriage in Kyrgyzstan – one of the post-Soviet states of Central Asia. We use retrospective survey data collected in 2011/12 that contain full partnership histories of a representative sample of men and women in that country. We estimate hazard regression models to examine competing risks of arranged and non-arranged marriage among Kyrgyz and Uzbek...

This paper describes Gary Becker’s theoretical models of marriage. At the micro level, these are all rational choice models. At the market level, Becker offers two major types of models: partial equilibrium models based on price theory as taught by Marshall and Friedman; and optimal sorting models based on optimal assignment models. This paper examines some of the possible intellectual influenc...