Why Wait? A Century of Education, Marriage Timing and Gender Roles

Murat Iyigun and Jeanne Lafortune

No 23, Working Papers ClioLab from EH Clio Lab. Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Abstract: We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are endogenous. Two key assumptions are made: marriage requires a fixed cost and married couples cannot study simultaneously. This simple model can replicate the aforementioned stylized facts and is consistent with our empirical result that exogenous delays in marriage age caused by minimum age laws decreased the educational difference within a couple while increasing their educational attainment.

Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Working Paper: Why Wait? A Century of Education, Marriage Timing and Gender Roles (2016)
Working Paper: Why Wait? A Century of Education, Marriage Timing and Gender Roles (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ioe:clabwp:23

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