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The article offers information on the perspectives on nonmarital relationships. Topics include, in the U.S., adults live in a variety of nonmarital relationships, ranging from committed partners who cohabit to people who cohabit with varying levels of commitment; intimate living of partners due to economic motives, such as sharing living expenses or because they may not feel financially stable enough to marry; and legal and law reform responses to nonmarital relationships vary.

This study investigates gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among persons of prime working ages (35-44 years) using U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000, and the 2009-2011 American Community Survey. We define the total financial return to education as the family standard of living as measured by family income adjusted for family size. Our results indicate that women experienced significant progress in educational attainment and labor market outcomes over this time period. Ironically, married women's progress in education and personal earnings has led to greater improvement in the family standard of living for married men than for women themselves. Gender-specific changes in assortative mating are mostly responsible for this paradoxical trend. Because the number of highly educated women exceeds the number of highly educated men in the marriage market, the likelihood of educational marrying up has substantially increased for men over time while women's likelihood has decreased. Sensitivity analyses show that the greater improvement in the family standard of living for men than for women is not limited to prime working-age persons but is also evident in the general population. Consequently, women's return to education through marriage declined while men's financial gain through marriage increased considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage formation is deeply embedded in societal context. This study documents trends towards lower marriage rates and delayed marriage in Europe and the US. Using time series analyses, it shows the relevance of economic and gender context in understanding marriage formation. The study extends previous work by including more countries, a longer time period, and by examining changes in predictors of marriage patterns over time. Analyses show that the association between economic context and marriage rates weakens over time, but the role of gender equality and policy context remain stable. Differences in age at first marriage across policy clusters are diminishing. Although greater gender equality is consistently linked to later marriage entry, the link between economic context and age at first marriage is changing. Changes in predictors of cross-national marriage patterns over time strongly suggest the institution of marriage itself is changing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are increasing concerns about whether Americans are saving enough for retirement. Recent research has called for improved understanding of the relationship between family structure and economic preparation for retirement at earlier stages of the life course. Using multiple years of the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, we examined how number of children and marital status were associated with women's household retirement savings at young and mid-adulthood. Several household-level indicators of retirement preparation were considered: desire to save for retirement, retirement account ownership, eligibility to participate in a defined-contribution plan, participation in defined-contribution plans, and retirement account wealth. Results from regression analyses revealed variation in women's household financial preparation for retirement at young and mid-adulthood by family context. Additional children were negatively associated with several measures of retirement preparation among single-female households but not for couple households. Overall, we found that low economic preparation for retirement is an additional economic disadvantage facing single mothers at young and mid-adulthood, with potentially long-term implications for their financial security. The results shed light on linkages between family structure and women's economic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on marriage in the U.S. It offers an overview of changes in family structure between 1970 and 2010 such as married women and living with their children, single women with children, and single mothers who have never married. It discusses effects of changes in family structure on children's development such as nonmarital births and single-parent families. It looks into government policies to reverse the fall in two-parent families and assist single-parent families.

The article reviews fifteen social experiments and their impact on marriage and cohabitation in the U.S. It examines policy interventions in areas including early childhood education, human capital development, workforce training and income support which were found to have improved economic standing and increased marriage among target men and women such as Career Academies, New Hope and Opportunity NYC.

The article presents racial and ethnic differences in marriage patterns in the U.S. It examines divergence of marriage patterns among white, Hispanic and black women on marriage formation and marital instability considering factors such as increases in economic contribution of women to the household, fall in relevance of marriage about family arrangements, and labor market land structural disadvantages, particularly for black men.

I examine the impact of the Great Depression on marriage outcomes and find that marriage rates and local economic conditions are positively correlated. Specifically, poor labor market opportunities for men negatively impact marriage. Conversely, there is some evidence that poor female labor markets actually increase marriage in the period. While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article develops a quantitative life-cycle model to study the increase in married women's labour force participation (LFP). We calibrate the model to match key life-cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort. We find that a higher divorce probability and changes in wage structure are each able to explain a large proportion of the LFP increase. Higher divorce risk increases LFP not because the latter contributes to higher marital assets or greater labour market experience, however. Instead, it is the result of conflicting spousal preferences towards the adjustment of marital consumption in the face of increased divorce risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Married women's labor force participation (LFP) increased dramatically in the United States between the 1940 and 1960 cohort. The two cohorts lived under different divorce regimes (unilateral divorce rather than mutual consent). The 1960 cohort also had a lower gender wage gap. We use a quantitative dynamic life-cycle model of endogenous marital status, calibrated to key statistics for the 1940 cohort, to study the effects of these two changes. We find that both drivers combined are able to account for over 50 percent of the increase in married women's LFP and also generate large movements in marriage and divorce rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relative cohort size-the ratio of young adults to prime-age adults-and relative income-the income of young adults relative to their material aspirations-have experienced substantial changes over the past 40 years. Results here show that changes in relative cohort size explain about 60 percent of the declines in women's starting wage-both relative and absolute-in 1968-82, and 97 percent of its increase in 1982-2001. Relative income is hypothesized to affect a number of behavioral choices by young adults, including marriage, childbearing, and female labor force participation, as young people strive to achieve their desired standard of living. Older family income-the denominator in a relative income variable-increased by 59 percent between 1968 and 2000, and then declined by 9 percent. Its changes explain 47 percent of the increase in the labor force participation of white married women in their first 15 years out of school between 1970 and 1990, and 38 percent of the increase in hours worked in the same period. The study makes use of individual-level measures of labor force participation and employs the lagged income of older families in a woman's year-state-race-education group to instrument parental income and hence material aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the law related to marriage in the U.S. It includes information on the law of the states that controls the validity and right of the marriage where the marriage is conducted. It also includes information on the E-Marriage that involves low costs and also provides freedom for same-sex marriage apart from the law that differ from state to state.

The article explores the relationship between economic recession, gender relationships, and marriage in the U.S. in the early 21st century. According to the author, several factors such as stagnant wages and the increased role of women in the labor market have reduced the hegemony of white male workers since the 1970s. It is suggested that men's household roles as family providers and their labor market roles in the construction and manufacturing industries are becoming obsolete. The author argues that more and more women in the 21st century are divorcing or choosing not to marry at all rather than providing for husbands who often do not take equal part in domestic labor and child care. Popular associations of maleness with aggression are also discussed.

The article explores the reasons explaining the author's assertion that Mexican-born women are more likely to participate in the U.S. workforce than Mexican-born women in Mexico. The author discusses traditional gender roles among Mexican and Mexican-American women, specifically the likelihood of Mexican-American women who are married and/or have children of participating in the workplace. The article also analyzes the immigration of Mexican-born women to the U.S. and how migration patterns impact the rate of employment for Mexican-born women in the U.S. and Mexico. The author also examines the types of jobs held by Mexican-born women in the U.S., particularly in farming, administrative office support, and sales.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we replicate previous estimates of the marital wage differential for white men, extend the analysis to African American men, then explain the within and between race differentials. We first control for formal job training, then for cognitive skills, parental background, and self-esteem with little effect. By contrast, the white differential but not the black differential disappears in fixed-effects estimation. We reconcile the cross-section/panel differentials by focusing on the distinct identification conditions employed by each technique. Men who never change marital status play a significant role in white cross-sectional estimates. ( JEL J31, J12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the international matchmaking industry has been particularly rapid and noticeable in the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War has intersected with daily socioeconomic pressures to make cross-cultural romance and marriage newly possible and newly desirable for some women of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. Less acknowledged than the role of economics in women's decision making, however, is the fact that postsocialist financial strains are not experienced in social vacuums but are mediated by ideals of gender and marriage, such that the search for a foreign spouse is unlikely to be experienced as a simple desire for increased material comfort. Instead, discourses of gender "crisis" in the home country inform the desires for transnational kinship for both women from the former Soviet Union and men from the United States. When both women's and men's narratives of "crisis" (and how transnational marriage might alleviate it) are taken into account, they significantly complicate our understandings of east-west relations of "commodification" and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop an equilibrium, a two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth, to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age of men and women at first marriage. Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model, I show that given an increase of the desired number of children age at marriage is affected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, with single men outnumbering single women in equilibrium. Using an extended version of the model to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the U.S. Baby Boom. Specifically, I find that the demographic transitional dynamics after the Baby Boom may account for approximately 23 percent of the increase in men’s age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, although the impact on women’s age is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates contemporary debates about same-sex marriage in relation to the politics of state austerity, particularly 'welfare reform', in the US. While these two issues are rarely thought about together, looking at claims for marriage rights in the context of cutbacks in social welfare programs and the increasing promotion of 'marriage incentives' as a means of getting low-income single mothers off welfare reveals conservative undertones to same-sex marriage campaigns. This article examines the specific benefits that gay and lesbian activists seek to access through marriage, arguing that these benefits are better understood as privileges of a racially stratified welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers. We use twin births to generate random within-state variation in benefits, effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior. Higher base welfare benefits (1) lead unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage and (2) lead unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth. The magnitudes of these effects are fairly modest. Moreover, we find no evidence that the marginal benefit paid at the birth of an additional child—the focus of the family cap debate—affects fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reveals the changes in African American marriage pattern and its correlation to economic changes. The article discusses several structural explanations for changes in marriage trends during the last several decades. These explanations range from focus on economic factors to emphasis on the centrality of demographic forces, to those that incorporate both perspectives. Economic explanations generally seek to explain variation in marriage by connecting such changes to economic changes in society. According to economic perspectives, changes in the economy affect motivations and the ability to marry, form and maintain traditional family organization. For the most part, changes in marriage have been linked either to changes in male economic opportunity or to female economic independence. Male economic viability explanations of marriage change are flawed in that they typically assume women's economic viability as an unimportant component of marital decisions. In other words, it is assumed that all women in a given age and racial group are equally attractive as potential marriage partners.

Economic incentives have been found to play an important role in the marriage decision in developed and developing countries, However, the way in which the income tax treatment of the family affects these incentives has been routinely ignored This paper uses time series data for the United States from 1947 to 1988 to estimate the impact of economic factors - including, for the first time, the tax consequences of marriage - on the aggregate marriage rate. The estimation results indicate that economic factors like income, female wages and education play an important and statistically significant role in the marriage decision. In particular, the tax consequences of marriage clearly affect the marriage decision: when income taxes increase with marriage, the aggregate marriage rate declines. However, the magnitude of this impact is quite small. This result suggests that some individuals respond to tax incentives in their marriage choices, but that for many individuals taxes do not affect these decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the present article is to quantify the influence of various factors on marital instability using the theoretical framework developed in the economic literature and data from a survey recently conducted in the USA, the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). This data set is rich in information on husbands' and wives' characteristics, allowing examination of several factors that previous studies have been unable to consider. The data are analysed using Cox's proportional hazards model (1972). This is a technique for the analysis of 'survival times', data that measure the interval until a certain event happens. While survival models have been employed extensively in the biomedical sciences to estimate the impact of exogenous variables on patient survival, and more recently by demographers interested in birth intervals and mortality, they have received little attention from economists.
The paper is organized as follows: Section II outlines the economic theory of family formation and dissolution on which this research rests; Section III presents the econometric technique; the data, variables and empirical results are described in Section IV; and Section V closes the paper with a summary of the main findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]