Marriage: Past, Present, Future?

Today, more than one third of children are born to unmarried mothers in a number of Western Countries. Evidently, activities formerly confined to the realms of marriage are no longer so. Does marriage have a future or is it condemned to the scrap heap of history? And does it matter? Arguably, to answer such questions we need to have a grasp on what marriage is. To that end, I will discuss legal and biological aspects of family formation – two factors which have been given curiously little attention in family economics, a field hugely influenced by Becker’s work, starting with his (1973) “A Theory of Marriage.” However, despite its title, the paper abstracted from marriage itself by treating formal and informal unions alike ∗Dept. of Economics, Columbia University. E-mail: [email protected] For instance, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, and the Nordic countries.