Will you “quasi-marry” me? The rise of cohabitation and decline of marriages

Effrosyni Adamopoulou

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: In Western Europe and the US, the last couple of decades have witnessed a large increase in the new forms of marriages, usually called quasi-marriages, like cohabitation. Today in many European countries more than 15% of all couples are cohabiting. Furthermore, cohabiting couples differ from married ones. They tend to share household tasks and market works more equally than married couples. The aim of this paper is to account for the rise in cohabitation as well as the cross-sectional differences between cohabiting and married couples. To this end, we build a two-period model of marriage and cohabitation with home production. Using this framework, we analyze, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of the narrowing of the gender wage gap and the improvement in household production technology on the agents’ marital decisions.

Keywords: Marriage; Cohabitation; Marital; institutions; Household; production; technology; Gender; wage; gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:we1026

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