Research > Research Themes > Growth and Structure of Populations > Marriage, divorce, cohabitation

Marriage was once a proximate determinant of fertility; but the link with intercourse is long past. Harknett, with J. Goldstein, in Soc Forces find that relationship status at the time of a birth depends mainly on father's race rather than on whether mother and father's race/ethnicity differ. Parents are less likely to marry after a birth if one parent is black, and the relationships of Hispanic couples are particularly stable. Jacobs does research on the relationship between women’s participation in the labor force, education, marriage, and fertility; papers in progress consider spousal financial contributions to marriages under occupational homogamy, and the fertility of students. Kao studies ethnic boundaries to dating and mating; and Park is beginning work on the growth of divorce in Korea and Japan. Ríos-Rull has several papers on marriage and divorce, including interracial marriage patterns and the role of sex-imbalances in marriage (an interest shared with Harknett). A model of marriage with interacting agents is calibrated that assumes an asymmetry across men and women with respect to the length of their fertile period (women can only bear children for a limited period) and that outside opportunities to marry, measured by the ratio of single men to women, play a central role in inducing agents to marry and divorce. The model is consistent with the secular improvement in marriage conditions for men, the rise in age at marriage, and the rise in divorce observed in the data. Stevenson’s work on the effects of unilateral divorce on family violence is described in A1.5; another result is a decline in marriage-specific capital investment (J Lab Econ), and a paper in J Econ Persp surveys forces behind trends in US marriage and divorce rates.