In 1667, Cosimo de Medici, heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, embarked on a grand tour of Europe, mostly at his father’s urging, in order to escape his unhappy marriage to a cousin of French king Louis XIV.1 Prince Cosimo’s travels took him to, among other places, the province of Holland in the Dutch Republic, where he famously visited the aging painter Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam.2 Religi...

Mate choice matters for inclusive fitness, household economic efficiency, assimilation, stratification, and economic inequalities in society. In positive assortative mating, people pair with someone who resembles them along a trait, whereas in negative assortative mating, people pair with someone who differs from them along a trait. In industrial nations, people tend to follow positive assortat...

This paper examines marriage market equilibrium when allocation is determined by bargaining in marriage rather than binding agreements between prospective spouses. We view sorting in the marriage market and allocation in marriage as a two-stage game in which prospective spouses, when they meet in the marriage market, foresee the allocation that would emerge from bargaining in marriage, but are ...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to assess the risk of major anomalies in the offspring of consanguineous couples, including data on the prenatal situation. METHODS Over 20 years (1993-2012), 35,391 fetuses were examined by prenatal sonography. In 675 cases (1.9%), parents were consanguineous, with 307 couples (45.5%) related as first cousins, 368 couples (54.5%) beyond first cousin...

Using data from two surveys in three counties where the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage differs greatly, this paper analyzes the effects of marriage form, individual, family and social factors on age at first marriage and spousal age difference. The results show that, under the Chinese patrilineal joint family system, compared with the dominant virilocal marriage form, uxorilocal marriage sig...