Age at first marriage is a most important factor in population dynamics as it affects fertility tremendously and mortality and migration to a lesser extent. Marriage is nearly universal everywhere in Bangladesh. Age at first marriage has a strong influence on a variety of demographic, social and economic factors. Early marriage is more common matter among the poorest women in Bangladesh than wo...

Shelley Clark, Alissa Koski, Emily Smith-Greenaway Age at first marriage has been rising throughout sub-Saharan Africa for more than twenty-five years. The median age at first marriage has increased by an average of 1-2 years across the region but substantial variation in age at first marriage remains (Garenne 2004). In some western and eastern African countries including Burkina Faso, Guinea, ...

The social integration of immigrants is believed to be an important determinant of immigrants’ labor market outcomes. Using 2000 U.S. Census data, we examine how and why marriage to a native, one measure of social assimilation, affects immigrant employment rates. We show that even when controlling for a variety of human capital and assimilation measures, marriage to a native increases the proba...

The low school attainment, early marriage, and low age at first birth of females are major policy concerns in less developed countries. This study jointly estimated the determinants of educational attainment, marriage age, and age at first birth among females aged 12-25 in Madagascar, explicitly accounting for the endogeneities that arose from modelling these related outcomes simultaneously. An...

Married adults show better psychological adjustment and physical health than their separated/divorced or never-married counterparts. However, this apparent "marriage benefit" may be due to social selection, social causation, or both processes. Genetically informed research designs offer critical advantages for helping to disentangle selection from causation by controlling for measured and unmea...

We propose a typology of different meanings of cohabitation that combines cohabiters' intentions to marry with a general attitude toward marriage, using competing risk analyses to examine whether some cohabiters are more prone than others to marry or to separate. Using data (N = 1,258) from four waves of the German Family Panel (PAIRFAM) and a supplementary study (DEMODIFF), we compared eastern...

The present research examines the implications of psychological essentialism for attitudes toward same-sex marriage (SSM), a hotly contested policy issue. Based on the literature on psychological essentialism, we tested the novel proposition that negative SSM attitudes are the result of essentialist thinking about the institution of marriage itself, the idea that marriage is universal, unique a...

Explanations for the emergence of monogamous marriage have focused on the cross-cultural distribution of marriage strategies, thus failing to account for their history. In this paper I reconstruct the pattern of change in marriage strategies in the history of societies speaking Indo-European languages, using cross-cultural data in the systematic and explicitly historical framework afforded by t...

BACKGROUND The increase in childbearing within cohabitation raises a question about the link between parenthood and partnership. In Norway, having the first child in cohabitation has become the most common pattern. OBJECTIVE The paper studies the interrelated meaning of partnership, marriage, and childbearing. We ask what children mean to partnerships, what the meaning of marriage is for childb...

Effective marriage matching, i.e. forming specific couples from pools of potential marriage partners, is vital for the success of dynamic longitudinal microsimulation models. This paper identifies some problems with a deterministic algorithm previously used in CORSIM, and in its “child” models, e.g., DYNACAN and POLISIM, for matching prospective marriage partners. It describes an alternative, s...