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Marriage Markets and Intermarriage: Exchange in First Marriages and Remarriages

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Demography

Abstract

Drawing on data from the American Community Survey, we compare patterns of assortative mating in first marriages, remarriages, and mixed-order marriages. We identify a number of ascribed and achieved characteristics that are viewed as resources available for exchange, both as complements and substitutes. We apply conditional logit models to show how patterns of assortative mating among never-married and previously married persons are subject to local marriage market opportunities and constraints. The results reveal that previously married individuals “cast a wider net”: spousal pairings are more heterogamous among remarriages than among first marriages. Marital heterogamy, however, is reflected in systematic evidence of trade-offs showing that marriage order (i.e., status of being never-married) is a valued trait for exchange. Never-married persons are better positioned than previously married persons to marry more attractive marital partners, variously measured (e.g., highly educated partners). Previously married persons—especially women—are disadvantaged in the marriage market, facing demographic shortages of potential partners to marry. Marriage market constraints take demographic expression in low remarriage rates and in heterogamous patterns of mate selection in which previously married partners often substitute other valued characteristics in marriage with never-married persons.

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Notes

  1. Among children living with single parents, 86 % lived with mothers (Kreider and Ellis 2011). However, ACS data cannot distinguish whether any children older than 1 (presumably from previous relationships) are the biological child(ren) of the husband, wife, or both. For descriptive analyses, we assume that the mother and not the father is a biological parent of children from previous relationships among currently married couples. Thus, the percentage with children over age 1 is 0 among first-married and remarried men but overcounted among their female counterparts.

  2. An analogous conceptual framework is provided in the residential mobility or white flight literature: white movers identify a set of desirable neighborhoods to live and then a specific house or residence within this limited pool of neighborhoods (see Bader and Krysan 2015). Like our study, conditional logit models have been similarly employed in such studies (Quillian 2015).

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Acknowledgments

This article was supported in part by center grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH) to Brown University (P2C HD041020) and Cornell University. We thank Dmitry Tumin and Yue Qian for research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Brown University, Box 1916, 108 George Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Zhenchao Qian

  2. Departments of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology, Cornell University, 2314 MVR, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Daniel T. Lichter

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  1. Zhenchao Qian
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Correspondence to Zhenchao Qian.

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Qian, Z., Lichter, D.T. Marriage Markets and Intermarriage: Exchange in First Marriages and Remarriages. Demography 55, 849–875 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0671-x

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