Will you marry me? It depends (on the business cycle)

Héctor Bellido and Miriam Marcén

Review of Economics of the Household, 2021, vol. 19, issue 2, No 13, 579 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and the marriage rate, using a panel data of 30 European countries for 1991 to 2018. Our results point to a pro-cyclical behavior of marriage rates, which holds after controlling for country-level observed and unobserved characteristics. We detect possible different responses of the marriage rate to the business cycle, after considering a wide range of country-level regulation affecting couples (taxation, property division, informal relationship regulations, and reproduction). Our findings suggest an important role of the cost/gain of marriage versus cohabitation/singlehood. Supplemental analysis reveals gender differences in the relationship between the business cycle and the marriage rate, depending on the previous legal marital status of the individuals. We provide additional evidence on the consequences of the pro-cyclical response of marriage rate by exploring variations in the stock of married/unmarried individuals. Results show a clear negative association between the business cycle and the stock of married individuals, but no negative response is found for the stock of those living as unmarried couples.

Keywords: Marriage; Unemployment; Business cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-020-09493-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:reveho:v:19:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11150-020-09493-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-020-09493-z

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().