Economics Research Seminar Series: Satoshi Tanaka

Satoshi Tanaka (University of Queensland) will present his paper "Sex Ratios and Long-Term Marriage Trends (with Jose-Victor Rios-Rull and Shannon Seitz)" at  the Economics Research Seminar Series.

Abstract:

In this paper, we ask to what extent changes to the age and sex structure of the population account for the changes in the marriage behavior observed in the United States in the last century (from 1900 to 1980). The decrease in mortality, especially for women, and the changes in immigration patterns have increased the female to male ratio. With respect to marriage, there has been (i) a reduction in the gender gap of the age at first marriage, (ii) an increase in incidence of marriage, (iii) a relative increase in men’s prevalence of marriage, and (iv) a large increase in the divorce rate. We pose a model of marriage and divorce in which preferences over partners depend on partner’s age and where search frictions make it difficult to get new partners. We estimate our model using marital and population patterns of the 1950 birth cohort. Next, we combine the preference parameters estimated on the 1950 cohort and the age and sex structure of the 1870 cohort. The resulting marriage patterns are quite similar to those observed in the 1870 cohort, suggesting that shifts in preferences for marriage are not driving recent trends. In combination with the liberalization of divorce laws and the change in the gains to marriage, the resemblance is even stronger. In particular, we find that these features account for most of the changes in the marriage behavior observed in the last century: Our model explains (a) 96% of the narrowing of the gender gap in the age at first marriage (b) 102% of the increase in the incidence of marriages for women and 109% for men.