Pierre André Chiappori (Columbia) "Family Economics" - Cemmap

1
Facts
The purpose of this chapter is to present some basic and general facts
about the marriage and the family. The chapter is intended to motivate
the analysis that follows in the rest of the book by showing how presumably
non-economic activities, such as marriage and fertility, interact with
economic considerations such as work, wages and schooling.
1.1 Marriage, divorce and remarriage
1.1.1 Marital status
Marriage is a "natural state". Table 1.1 shows the proportions (the ‘stocks’)
in each marital state for three different years for six high income countries.
These figures show that most of the adult population (aged 20 or older) is
married at any given time (about 55−70 percent). However the proportion
of the adult population that is married has declined in most countries in the
last fifty years. This trend is accompanied by a larger proportion of never
married and a higher proportion of divorced individuals, with little change
in the proportion of widowed (because of the offsetting effects of reduced
marriage and mortality). In all countries and at all times, the proportion
of never married women is significantly lower than the proportion of never
married men; this is partially attributable to the fact that men marry
later. Explaining these cross-country regularities and trends is a major
challenge for demographers and economists. Factors that may be related
to the changes in marital status that we see in this table are: changes in the
age structure; delays in marriage; the relative attractiveness of alternative
household arrangements; higher turnover and longer life spans.
There are some notable differences among the countries, reflecting different
social norms and legal regimes. As an obvious example, the low stock of
divorcees in Italy reflects the fact that divorce was illegal until 1970. As another
example, the increasing proportion of ‘never married’ in Denmark can
be attributed to cohabitation, which has become common in Scandinavia.
Strictly, cohabitation should be seen as an alternative state and an extra
column should be included in Table 1.1, but it has been relatively unimportant
in most countries until recently. To give some idea of the level
and changes in cohabitation we present numbers from the US and Denmark
in Table 1.2; this gives the proportion of couples (classified by the
head’s age) who live together who are not formally married. As can be seen,
This is page 13
Printer: Opaque this