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Age at marriage and marital instability: revisiting the Becker–Landes–Michael hypothesis

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Abstract

An early age at first marriage is known to be associated with a high risk of divorce. Yet, it has been suggested that beyond a certain point, the relationship between age at marriage and marital instability may become positive because as unmarried women begin to hear their biological clock tick, they may settle for matches far from the optimal. Analyses based on cycles 5 and 6 of the National Surveys of Family Growth show that the relationship between age at marriage and marital instability is strongly negative up to the late 20s, with a flattening of the curve thereafter.

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Notes

  1. For a review of other determinants of marital instability, including own children and other human capital investments, see Weiss 1997 and Lehrer 2003.

  2. Contrary to the prediction of Becker’s (1973) model, there is positive assortative mating by wages when other factors are held constant. Lam (1988) provides an explanation for this empirical regularity. He develops the idea that joint consumption of public goods, an important source of gains from marriage, generates a tendency for positive assortative mating by wages due to the returns from the spouses having similar demands for public goods.

  3. Another interpretation that has been suggested for the effect of age is as a proxy for the length of search and the quality of the match (Weiss and Willis 1997). However, as the pattern of delayed marriage has unfolded over the past decades, the connection between age at marriage and the length of the dating process has weakened. Substantial anecdotal evidence suggests that couples entering marriage in the late 20s and 30s often first met as mature adults.

  4. To minimize loss of information, imputations were used for missing data. Most imputations, including the dates of various events, were available in the public use data files, based on sophisticated imputation procedures. The few cases that had missing information on education were assigned the lowest education category; the modal category was used for other control variables. Dummy variables indicating imputations for the controls were included in preliminary runs; they were insignificant in all cases and dropped in the final models.

  5. In the empirical analysis, union dissolution was defined as of the date of divorce for respondents whose first marriage had ended in divorce, and as of the date the spouses stopped living together for those who had been married only once and were separated at the time of the interview. Unions that were dissolved through widowhood were treated as censored at the time of the husband’s death.

  6. The estimated fifth-year dissolution probability for the reference woman is lower in this specification because the regression now includes the husband’s and couple’s characteristics and the modal traits are generally associated with stabilizing forces (husband not married before, homogamy in all dimensions).

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Acknowledgements

I received many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper from Deborah Cobb-Clark, three anonymous referees, and participants in the session on Union Dissolution at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, March 30–April 1, 2006, Los Angeles. Zhenxiang Zhao provided skillful research assistance.

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  1. Economics Department (m/c 144), University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL, 60607-7121, USA

    Evelyn L. Lehrer

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Correspondence to Evelyn L. Lehrer.

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Responsible editor: Deborah Cobb-Clark

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Lehrer, E.L. Age at marriage and marital instability: revisiting the Becker–Landes–Michael hypothesis. J Popul Econ 21, 463–484 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-006-0092-9

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