We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, re...

A proof of Hall’s Marriage Theorem due to Halmos and Vaughan [1]. theory Marriage imports Main

The authors longitudinally examined couples' (N = 197) dedication (interpersonal commitment) levels on the basis of their premarital cohabitation history. Findings suggested that men who cohabited with their spouse before engagement were less dedicated than men who cohabited only after engagement or not at all before marriage. Furthermore, these husbands were less dedicated to their wives than ...

This paper proposes and estimates a static non-parametric transferable utility model of the marriage market. The model rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions as well as pointing out its limitations. The model was used to estimate US marital behavior in 1971/72 and 1981/82. The estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the d...

Using data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the hypothesis that women attain less schooling as a result of social and financial pressure to marry young. We isolate the causal effect of marriage timing using age of menarche as an instrumental variable. Our results indicate that each additional year that marriage is delayed is associated with 0.22 additional year of schooling and 5.6 percent hig...

A growing number of social scientists fear that marriage may be on the rocks and few doubt that matrimony, as we have known it, has undergone a wrenching period of change in the past several decades. Andrew Cherlin, a leading sociologist of the family, speaks of "the de-institutionalization of marriage," conceding a point to conservative commentators who have argued that marriage and the family...

Early marriage, defined as marriage before the age of 18, is mainly practiced in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where over one third of African girls and nearly a half of South Asian girls are married during childhood. In subSaharan Africa, the highest rates of child marriage are found in West Africa, in countries such as Niger, Chad and Mali. However, in East Africa, the numbers of girls m...

Cohabitation and marriage in the United States are converging relationships for those cohabiters who eventually marry. Using the “National Survey of Families and Households” and the “National Survey of Family Growth” as data sources, this dissertation examines trends over time in cohabitation and the types of people who cohabit before marriage, differences in behavior across relationship stages...

The timing of first union merits investigation not only because of the close temporal link between marriage and the onset of childbearing, but also because the age when men and women marry has implications for the organization of family life and for gender relations within society. This paper begins by reviewing the contributions of various social science disciplines to an understanding of the ...

It has long been argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would have a negative impact on marriage. In this article, I examine how different-sex marriage in the Netherlands was affected by the enactment of two laws: a 1998 law that provided all couples with an institution almost identical to marriage (a "registered partnership") and a 2001 law that legalized same-sex marriage for the f...