Customary marriage (nikāḥ ‘urfī)—non-official married life of a couple—is a new phenomenon increasingly spreading throughout the Arab world. Legal and social consequences of customary marriage have led many socio-jurisprudential scholars to forbid all its varieties. The strategy has, nevertheless, failed to restrain the spread of this type of marriage. In this paper, I argue that one f...

This paper examines marriage market equilibrium when allocation is determined by bargaining in marriage rather than binding agreements between prospective spouses. We view sorting in the marriage market and allocation in marriage as a two-stage game in which prospective spouses, when they meet in the marriage market, foresee the allocation that would emerge from bargaining in marriage, but are ...

Using data from two surveys in three counties where the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage differs greatly, this paper analyzes the effects of marriage form, individual, family and social factors on age at first marriage and spousal age difference. The results show that, under the Chinese patrilineal joint family system, compared with the dominant virilocal marriage form, uxorilocal marriage sig...

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...

vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Background 1 Study objectives 2 Study setting 3 Methods 3 Chapter 2: Early marriage: Preferences and realities 5 Age at marriage: Girls’ preferences 5 Age at marriage: Parents’ preferences 6 Age at marriage: The reality 7 Chapter 3: Factors underlying early marriage 9 Poverty and the burden of marriage-related expenses 9 Concerns about finding a suitable groom 9 ‘Ev...

Marriage formation is deeply embedded in societal context. This study documents trends towards lower marriage rates and delayed marriage in Europe and the US. Using time series analyses, it shows the relevance of economic and gender context in understanding marriage formation. The study extends previous work by including more countries, a longer time period, and by examining changes in predicto...

I examine the effect of marriage penalties in the US income tax system on marital status. I construct a simulated instrument that exploits variation in the tax code over time and between US states to deal with potential endogeneity between the marriage penalty a couple faces and their marital status. I find that a $1000 increase in the marriage penalty faced reduces the probability of marriage ...

Title of dissertation: THE EFFECT OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE LAWS ON DIFFERENT-SEX MARRIAGE: EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS Mircea Ştefan Trandafir, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor Judith K. Hellerstein Department of Economics It has long been argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would have a negative impact on marriage. My dissertation examines what happene...