samlet årgang - Økonomisk Institut - Københavns Universitet

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Table 1. Number of marriages.
NATIONALØKONOMISK TIDSSKRIFT 2005. NR. 3
Number of marriages Number of persons Percentage
1 10409 95.7
2 459 4.2
3 12 0.1
4 2 0.0
The information used in the analysis is gathered in the following way: I observe the
individuals in 1980 where I have information about various personal characteristics
and marriage market status. For each subsequent year I observe a new stream of data
for the individuals. If the individual enters a relationship I also observe the personal
characteristics of the partner. Since I am interested in marriages, and especially the
personal characteristics during the marriage, I disregard left censored marriages. The
individuals were between 15 and 25 years of age in 1980, and since I disregard individuals
already married, the first marriage of the unit of observation is observed for the
majority of the individuals (some may, of course, already be divorced). The partners are
not restricted by age, and it is therefore more likely that they have experienced more
marriages at the time I observe them.
In the sample there are 10822 marriages during the period. The number of marriages
per person is distributed as presented in Table 1.
Only around 4 percent experience more than one marriage during the sample period.
3.1. Explanatory variables
Table 2 contains descriptive statistics of the variables used in the analysis. The mean
and standard deviation of the explanatory variables are the calculated at start of the marriage.
All variables are, however, allowed to vary during the marriage spell.
The main variabels of interest are a dummy indicating whether the couple premaritally
cohabited and four variables representing differences in expected and realised earnings.
The latter variables are constructed in the following manner. First, an earnings
equation is estimated by OLS. In this first step, earnings are regressed on education,
age, geographical belonging, number of kids, level of unemployment and sickness. In
the second step, the predicted earnings in a given year are compared to the actual earnings
to define four variables:
∧ ∧
Positive deviation i =(Earnings i,t – Earnings i,t ) if Earnings i,t > Earnings i,t ,
∧ ∧
Negative deviation i = (Earnings i,t – Earnings i,t ) if Earnings i,t Earnings i,t
where i = husband, wife.