Anthropologists have long been interested in the survival of Indian cultural traits in the New World. In this article, we present results of an ongoing project with a Costa Rican community that descends from East Indian indentured servants. We focus on the group’s marriage patterns and how these patterns might have helped keep the community as a cohesive ethnic group. We investigate the group’s...

The analytical framework proposed by Davis and Blake (1956) divides the process of reproduction into three elements: (i) exposure to the risk of pregnancy, (ii) the ability to conceive and (iii) successful gestation. This paper is concerned with the first element. Data from the 1973 National Demographic Survey of Tanzania (NDS) are used to investigate the role of marriage behavior in determinin...

Using a representative sample of children all born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and a potential outcome approach to account for self-selection into marriage, we investigate whether marriage after childbearing has a causal effect on early child development. Comparing children with similar background characteristics and parental mate-selection pattern...

We use the 1990 U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample to assess the effect of union type and conceptions of marriage markets on patterns of intimate interracial contact. In so doing we challenge the assumptions that marriage is the only type of union that needs to be examined, and that people select partners in a national marriage market. Our results suggest that neither of these assumptions ...

This article explores the remarkable shift in marriage and divorce practices that has occurred in the last third of this century in the United States. Initially, information is presented on trends in divorce and remarriage; commonalities and differences between family patterns in the United States and in other industrialized nations are discussed. The author then identifies some of the factors ...

This paper describes marriage and partnership patterns and trends in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa from 2000-2006. The study is based on longitudinal, population-based data collected by the Africa Centre demographic surveillance system. We consider whether the high rates of non-marriage among Africans in South Africa reported in the 1980s were reversed following the political transformation...

In this paper, we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce. We use data on Spain, since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country. We find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate, pointing to a procyclical evolution of marriage; however the response of the divorce ...

Choice mechanisms and social networks, including "marriage markets", seem well-suited to be modelled using agent-type simulations. Few real-world empirical examples are available in the public literature, particularly those using human populations of size. We reviewed partnership models in both the micro-simulation and agent-based literatures. We then empirically implemented an algorithm derive...

This paper examines how the marital behaviors of Hui Muslims respond to varying conditions of local ethnic marriage markets. Specifically, we explore marriage patterns indicating adherence to two Islamic norms: universal marriage and endogamy. We measure marriage market conditions by local concentrations of Hui and we estimate discrete-time hazard models of marital outcomes using the China 2005...

While many models have investigated the role of competitive mate selection processes in human marriage, few have addressed the potential for assortative processes to explain the observed demographics, as well as simultaneously investigating divorce. To explore the possibility that assortative mate selection processes may explain patterns of both marriage and divorce, we developed an agent-based...