On 3 December 1996, a Hawaiian state court upheld the legalization of same-sex marriage, although the next day the presiding judge set the ruling aside pending the outcome of an appeal by the state. This ruling rekindled fears that exist regarding the potential legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the United States. To answer concerns regarding same-sex marriage, I will examine several ...

I expand Gary Becker’s market analysis of marriage behavior to derive a set of new implications about marriage and education. In my model, people can make college and career investments to improve their income and marriage prospects before they enter the marriage market. In the overlapping-generations marriage market, men are characterized by income, and women are characterized by income and re...

Despite increasing international attention to child marriage and its negative health and social consequences, little is known about the knowledge and beliefs of individuals who are in control of negotiating children's marriages and of the social context in which these individuals function. Using data from a 2007 cross-sectional household survey and multilevel logistic regression models, this pa...

Although disadvantaged women are the targets of marriage programs, little attention has been paid to women's marriage constraints and their views of marriage. Drawing on an exchange framework and using qualitative data collected from single women participating in a marriage initiative, we introduce the concept of marriageable women-the notion that certain limitations may make women poor marriag...

BACKGROUND A well-documented association exists between age at marriage and the risk of divorce. However, substantial gaps in our knowledge and understanding of its origins, nature, and implications still exist. OBJECTIVES This article documents the relationship between women’s ages at first marriage and marriage cohort divorce rates, assessing the importance of relative ages at marriage (based...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, one must distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the absence of a state intervention (average marriage). We exploit the suspension of a cash-on-hand marriage subsidy i...

Most matching models of the marriage market assume increasing returns to scale, that is, they postulate that a larger pool of eligibles will lead to a higher marriage rate. Empirically, the difficulty in studying the cross-section relationship between the size of the marriage market and marriage behavior is that, in general, market size is endogenous. We address this issue in two ways. First, w...

The marriage market is a dynamic bilateral matching market with finitely lived participants. The growth rate of the number of marriages between two types of individuals estimates the systematic benefit to them delaying marriage for a period versus marrying immediately. Identification of the semi-parametric model is transparent. The model is estimated with 1990 US marriage data. The estimated mo...

BACKGROUND Child marriage, defined as marriage before age 18, is associated with adverse human capital outcomes. The child marriage burden remains high among female adolescents in Indonesia, despite increasing socioeconomic development. Research on child marriage in Southeast Asia is scarce. No nationally representative studies thus far have examined determinants of child marriage in Indonesia ...