Abstract
Internet use has lowered search costs in the marriage market, as participants (both single and married) can now search for and gather information more easily on potential partners. Additionally, the internet provides ample entertainment options that may act as a substitute for relationships. This paper extends the literature on internet and marriage by using more recent data, a more refined geographical level, and by including a measure of mobile internet. County-level data provides ample variation in internet access and enables consideration of marriage-market size as measured by population and urban density. Fixed-effect regressions indicate that increases in internet access from 2008–2015, either through broadband or cell phone access, are associated with decreased marriage and increased divorce in rural counties. However, in large metropolitan areas, expansion in internet access is correlated with increases in the married population and decreases in the divorced or separated populations. Regressions on age at marriage and percent of the ever-married population in their first, second, or third marriage suggests that the rise in the married population in urban areas is derived from both an increase in initial uptake of marriage and an increase in re-matching of divorcees in secondary marriage markets.
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Notes
There are dozens of dating sites that can be identified from a quick search, many with reviews by thousands of users. The majority of these sites were founded after 2000 (with Yahoo personals, Match, and Jdate being a few exceptions founded in the late 1990s). Many of these sites service niche markets and cater to preferences over race and religion (BlackPeopleMeet, InterracialMatch, Jdate, ChristianMingle), preference on age (ourTime, SeniorPeopleMeet, SilverSingles), and lifestyle (MeetMe, FarmersOnly, DateMySchool, MilitaryCupid, ProfessionalMatch, EliteSingle, SingleParentMeet). In addition to many of the main sites, such as Match, Zoosk, Tinder, Chemistry, PlentyOfFish, and OkCupid, which cater to both heterosexual and homosexual couples, there are many sites dedicated strictly to the gay community (Adam4Adam, BiCupid, CompatiblePartners, Gaydar, GayRomeo, Grinder).
Social Media continues to expand and change, allowing people to share details of their professional life (Linked-In, founded 2002), personal photos and information (Facebook, founded 2004), videos (You Tube, founded 2005), their thoughts (twitter, founded 2006), their photos (Instagram, founded 2010), and their favorite websites (Pinterest, founded 2010). Additionally, interactive games have brought people together across the internet, from simple games like (words with friends, released 2009), to complex multi-player universes (such as: World of Warcraft, released 2004; League of Legends, released 2009; Call of Duty, released 2010; The Elder scrolls, released 2011) which also allow for chat and voice based discussion with other players.
Ashley Madison was founded in 2002, and was a website dedicated to matching those seeking extra marital affairs online, which claimed over 30 million worldwide users. Although that number was inflated by one-time users, curious viewers, and the now infamous company generated profiles, researchers were able to verify close to 100,000 frequent users in the US alone (Chohaney and Panozzo 2016).
There are multiple dating sites that cater to extra-marital searches and specifically allow a user to specify “married” under their relationship status (Gleeden, AshleyMadison, AdultFriendFinder). These sites are in addition to the many casual-sex sites that exist (GetItOn, IhookUp, Xmatch, FriendFinderX, and Passion).
Using state-level data on per-capita Facebook memberships, their impact is measured on the divorce rate from each state as reported by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Certain online dating sites work almost exclusively through cell phone applications - such as Grindr (founded 2009), Tinder (founded 2012), or Bumble (founded 2014).
Prior to the ACS, the only annual measure of marriage and divorce that exists at the county-level pre-date 1988 in hard copy form in the National Vital Health Statistics, Volume 3, Marriage and Divorce. State-level measures of marriage and divorce are available annually through the National Vital Health Statistics, but county measures are only calculated in the decennial census.
Data is accumulated over a 5-year (60 month) period to create an annual estimate. For example, the 2010 estimate is created by the ACS from surveys completed between 2005–2009, and 2011 estimate is created from surveys completed between 2006–2010. As such, there is overlap in the compilation of months for each estimate and although labeled for the year the data is released, it includes estimates of the variables as sampled and averaged over the years prior. See further information at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/handbooks/general.html.
Three-year averages only include counties with a population above 20,000, therefore 1,349 counties are missing during those years.
The annual ACS survey does not ask retrospective questions and only contains data on current marital status. As such, there is minimal ability to interpret someone’s “ever” marital status from their current marital status. Similarly, the divorced population consists only of those who consider their current marital status to be divorced, not those who are ever-divorced.
To view the distribution of married and divorced population across different types of counties (rural versus small and large MSAs) see Appendix Fig. A1.
MNOs ranked by number of subscribers: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. For more information see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_the_Americas#United_States.
There are 139 MVNOs operating within the US, which serve approximately 36 million consumers as of 2016. Some primary MVNOs are: Boost Mobile, Consumer Cellular, Cellular Abroad, Cricket Wireless, Metro Wireless, Straight Talk, Virgin Mobile, Walmart Family Mobile, Xfinity Mobile, with TracFone being the largest MVNO in the US. For more information see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mobile_virtula_network_operator.com.
In 2014, the FCC changed Form 447 and began collecting a different measurement for mobile broadband data. Consequently, post 2013 there is not a consistent measurement for this variable. Therefore, for years 2014 and 2015 the number of data providers in 2013 is assumed and imputed for the missing variables. This censors any change in the variable after 2013 and assumes that counties with a high number of carriers do not lose carriers. The binary variable created for the empirical specification (High mobile access) equals 1 when a county has 4 or more smart phone carriers. The imputation of 2013 value assumes that counties who achieve 4 or more carriers by 2013 do not fall below this threshold in 2014 or 2015. Furthermore, it stops any county from achieving High mobile status in 2014 or 2015 who had not done so by 2013. During the three years leading up to and including 2013, approximately 2.26% of counties lost their High Mobile status on average per year, while approximately 10% of counties gained High Mobile status. Therefore, censoring the data works against identifying an effect for the High Mobile variable as the measurement error is likely negative.
Metropolitan Statistical Areas, defined by Office of Management and Budget, consist of the county or counties associated with at least one urbanized area of at least 50,000 people, plus adjacent counties that have a high degree of social and economic integration with the core, as measured through commuting ties.
There does not exist a measure of marriage or divorce rates, or any measure of flow of these variables. Only the stock of married or divorced populations are measured by current census surveys.
Categories are those measured by the ACS, 0–19, 20–34, 35–49, 50–54, 55–65, 65+.
For regression specifications with the fixed effects and controls added in a stepwise fashion see Appendix Table A2.
To view regression results with mobile measures entered without broadband view Appendix Table A3.
Estimate determined as follows: −0.626 × (BB high = 1) + −0.0788 × (Mobile High = 1) + 0.7553 (BB high = 1 × MSA large = 1) + 0.4073 × (Mobile High = 1 × MSA large = 1) = 1.0212.
Estimate determined as follows: 1.0212 – (−0.626 × (BB high = 1) + −0.0788 × (Mobile High = 1)) = 1.1626.
As the findings in Table A4 indicate, internet access is highly statistically significant in predicting same-sex cohabitation rates, which further supports the hypothesis that the internet plays a more central role to those facing thin marriage markets.
Female marriage results for those aged 45–54, shown in Appendix Table A10, show larger coefficients than the gender-neutral results reported in Table 3. This further supports the thin market hypothesis. Women tend to marry those closer to their own age than men, and consequently face fewer potential matches than individuals who have a broader age range for acceptable mates.
The 12 states with no MSAs over one-million people are: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming. The 6 states with 75% or more in large MSAs are: California, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.
For brevity, only results on marital order are reported in the text of the paper, but the internet’s association with age of marriage is also explored and presented in the Appendix Tables A13, A14 & A15.
Similar to the results found on number of marriages, only mobile access has a statistically significant relationship with median age at first marriage. As shown in Table A14, and discussed in the appendix, primarily rural states that expanded mobile access experienced a statistically significant decline in age at first marriage while primarily urban states experienced an increase in median age at first marriage.
In Table A16, number of marriages is regressed on the continuous measure of broadband access. Similar results are found to those in Table 4, with slightly higher magnitude of coefficients on mobile phone carriers.
In Appendix Table A17, the regressions for number of marriages are presented by gender. Similar patterns are observed across both genders, but a larger decrease in second marriages are observed for women, while a larger increase in third-plus marriages are observed for men.
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Murray, S. How broadband and cell phone access have impacted marriage and divorce in the US. Rev Econ Household 18, 431–459 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-019-09464-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-019-09464-z