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...

In spite of an influx of Western propaganda concerning the superiority of marriages based on love, a 1994 opinion poll of 1715 adults in 5 urban centers in India found that 74% of men and women believe arranged marriages are more likely to succeed. Self-arranged marriages without the consent or participation of parents are rejected by most Indians due to the isolation from family support that ...

This article examines alternative approaches to encourage family formation among fragile families, including higher cash benefits, more liberal acceptance of welfare applications, more effective child support enforcement, and efforts to increase education and employment of low-income parents. We examine these approaches by refining and expanding previous work on a generalized logit model of the...

This article presents an overview of marriage patterns in East Asia. Globally, marriage patterns are changing. In East Asia, cultural patterns are slowing the changes in attitude toward marriage that are occurring in the West. There are implications of changing attitudes for government planners. This issue of Asia-Pacific Population and Policy is based on a series of studies of marriage and...

If a man has a matchmaking network, will this increase his chance of marrying? If so, do the different types of network ties play different roles? Using survey data from X County in Anhui Province (N = 412), we analyze the determinants of first marriage probability for 18 to 50year-old rural Chinese men in terms of their social networks. Age at first marriage for rural Chinese men is concentrat...

BACKGROUND Married young women's reproductive needs are a challenge in traditional Pakistani society. The decisions regarding family planning and pregnancy are controlled by the family, often involving complex negotiations. The current study was undertaken to explore how young married women's involvement in the arrangements surrounding their marriage is associated with their ability to negotiat...

It has long been debated how legalizing same-sex marriage would affect (different-sex) family formation. In this article, I use data on OECD member countries for the period 1980-2009 to examine the effects of the legal recognition of same-sex couples (through marriage or an alternative institution) on different-sex marriage, divorce, and extramarital births. Estimates from difference-in-differe...

Ethnic differentials in the timing of family formation in Fiji cannot be adequately explained by the norms, characteristics, minority group, and interaction hypotheses. The missing dimensions are socioeconomic level within ethnicity and time, including the marriage market effects of fertility transition. A complex interaction of factors involves underlying norms and the opposing effects of mode...