Fertility Shocks and Equilibrium Marriage-Rate Dynamics

John Knowles and Guillaume Vandenbroucke

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University

Abstract: Prolonged disruptions of the matching process can distort the apparent effect of the singles sex-ratio on marriage-market prospects. Contrary to the usual matching model predictions, female marriage probabilities were 50% higher in France in the years after World War 1, despite a large drop in the sex ratio. We develop a model of marital matching in which composition effects in the singles pool affect post-disruption matching rates. When calibrated to French data from World War 1, this mechanism explains 2/3 of the post-war rise in female marriage probabilities as the result of better composition of the pool of single men. 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)
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sfu.ca/repec-econ/sfu/sfudps/dp18-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: FERTILITY SHOCKS AND EQUILIBRIUM MARRIAGE‐RATE DYNAMICS (2019)
Working Paper: Fertility Shocks and Equilibrium Marriage-Rate Dynamics (2015)
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:sfu:sfudps:dp18-04

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Working Paper Coordinator ().