Are There Gains to Delaying Marriage? The Effect of Age at First Marriage on Career Development and Wages

David Loughran and Julie Zissimopoulos

No WR-207, Working Papers from RAND Corporation

Abstract: Age at first mariage has risen dramatically since the mid-1960s among a wide spectrum of the U.S. population. Researchers have considered many possible explanations for this trend. Few, though, have asked why individuals should want to delay marriage in the first place. One possibility is that early marriage inhibits the career development of one or both individuals in a marriage. This hypothesis is tested using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Using panel data methods that exploit longitudinal variation in wages and marriage timing, the authors estimate that delaying marriage increases hourly wages of women by nearly four percent for each year they delay. Marriage timing has no impact on the wages of men. They find that delaying marriage may have costs as well. All else equal, women who delay marriage marry spouses with lower wages.

Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2004-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/working_papers/2004/RAND_WR207.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:ran:wpaper:wr-207

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from RAND Corporation Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benson Wong ().