In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride’s family. Unmarried daughters could therefore be considered assets who, at times of need, can be cashed in. We investigate both theoretically and empirically to what extent the timing of a marriage of a daughter is...

This paper studies the relationship of parental resources to the marital transitions of children. It extends past research by explicitly distinguishing various dimensions of parental resources and by taking parental preferences directly into account. We test models in which parental resources have additive effects on the timing of marriage and models in which parental resources interact with pa...

Using pooled data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG 2006–2010), we examine the effects of denominational affiliation, worship service attendance, and religious salience on remarriage timing. Survival analyses indicate that both men and women affiliated with conservative Protestant faith traditions are significantly more likely than their unaffiliated and Catholic counterparts to r...

The probability of first marriage for men who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 was analyzed with respect to their Social Security earnings records, Wisconsin income tax reports for parents, and other variables. The findings provide no support for Easterlin's hypothesis that marriage will occur earlier when young men judge their economic prospects favorably with respect to their par...

Why Wait? A Century of Education, Marriage Timing and Gender Roles* We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are endogenous. Two key assumptions are made:...

This article examines 14-year longitudinal data and attempts to create a post hoc model that uses Time-1 data to "predict" the length of time the marriage will last. The sample consists of the 21 couples (of 79 studied) who divorced over a 14-year period. A two-factor model is proposed. One factor is the amount of unregulated volatile positive and negative affect in the marriage, and this facto...

The article presents an overview of trends in cohabitation and marriage in Britain over several decades, using a consistent set of retrospective histories from the General Household Survey 1979-2007. Time-trends are presented, for men and women, of: the experience of different types of partnership by specified ages, the frequency of premarital cohabitation, the average time spent in different t...

The objective of this study was to learn how post-birth marriage among fragile families was related to child behavior problems by examining the (1) characteristics that predict postbirth marriage, (2) the relationship of various dimensions of post-birth marriage (i.e., occurrence, timing, identity of mother’s partner, relationship trajectory, and family instability) to child behavior problems, ...