Fertility Shocks and Equilibrium Marriage-Rate Dynamics

John Knowles and Guillaume Vandenbroucke

No 2015-7, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: Why did the marriage probability of single females in France after World War 1 rise 50% above its pre-war average, despite a 33% drop in the male/female singles ratio? We conjecture that war-time disruption of the marriage market generated an abnormal abundance of men with relatively high marriage propensities. Our model of matching over the lifecycle, when calibrated to pre-war data and two war-time shocks, succeeds in matching the French time path under the additional assumption of a pro-natalist post-war preference shock. We conclude that endogeneity issues make the sex ratio a potentially unreliable indicator of female marriage prospects.

Keywords: Family Economics; Household Formation; Marriage; Fertility. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 E13 J12 J13 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2015-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-his and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: FERTILITY SHOCKS AND EQUILIBRIUM MARRIAGE‐RATE DYNAMICS (2019)
Working Paper: Fertility Shocks and Equilibrium Marriage-Rate Dynamics (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlwp:2015-007

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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2015.007

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