For modern Western societies with a regime of monogamy, it has recently been demonstrated that the socioeconomic status of men is positively associated with being or having been married. This study aims to compare marriage patterns (if a person has been married at least once) for cultures with a tradition of monogamy and polygyny. As no worldwide data on polygyny exist, religion was used as a p...

Jason Wells “...in good times and in bad...to have and to hold.” Promises of presence and support undergird most marriage vows, although their actual meaning is determined by each couple. Contemporary couples expect to create a companionate marriage, a union with emotional connectedness at its core. Spouses are expected to be best friends or emotional partners as well as to serve instrumental o...

Abstract We investigate how changes in the sex ratio induced by World War II affected bargaining patterns of Italian men marriage market. Marriage data from first wave Household Longitudinal Survey (1997) are matched with newly digitized information on war casualties coming National Bureau Statistics. find that post-war marriages were better off terms their spouse's education, this gain amounti...

Age at first marriage has risen dramatically since the mid-1960s among a wide spectrum of the U.S. population. Researchers have considered many possible explanations for this trend. Few, though, have asked why individuals should want to delay marriage in the first place. One possibility is that early marriage inhibits the career development of one or both individuals in a marriage. We test this...

BACKGROUND Marriage histories are a valuable data source for investigating nuptiality. While researchers typically acknowledge the problems associated with their use, it is unknown to what extent these problems occur and how marriage analyses are affected. OBJECTIVE This paper seeks to investigate the quality of marriage histories by measuring levels of misreporting, examining the characteris...