The Marital Satisfaction of Differently-Aged Couples

Wang-Sheng Lee and Terra McKinnish

No 10863, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate how the marital age gap affects the evolution of marital satisfaction over the duration of marriage using household panel data from Australia. We find that men tend to be more satisfied with younger wives and less satisfied with older wives. Interestingly, women likewise tend to be more satisfied with younger husbands and less satisfied with older husbands. Marital satisfaction declines with marital duration for both men and women in differently-aged couples relative to those in similarly-aged couples. These relative declines erase the initial higher levels of marital satisfaction experienced by men married to younger wives and women married to younger husbands within 6 to 10 years of marriage. A possible mechanism is that differently-aged couples are less resilient to negative shocks compared to similarly-aged couples, which we find some supportive evidence for.

Keywords: marital satisfaction; marital duration; marital age gap; assortative matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2018, 31, 337-362.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10863.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The marital satisfaction of differently aged couples (2018)
Working Paper: The Marital Satisfaction of Differently-Aged Couples (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp10863

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().