Cada vez menos y más tarde: un análisis de la nupcialidad masculina durante los últimos treinta años en España.

Spaniards are getting married later and in smaller proportions. Gary Becker's economic theory of the family and Oppenheimer's theory of marriage timing try to explain these trends. The aim of this paper, focused on men's nuptiality patterns, is to determine whether the hypotheses derived from such theories apply to the Spanish case. To this end, the Spanish Labour Force Survey is used, and the method of artificial cohorts and logistic regression are applied. The findings show that unemployment, fixed-term contracts, the cost of access to the housing market and women's absolute rate of employment are negatively related to the likelihood of getting married. From these results, a discussion on how Spanish society has handled the socio-economic changes that have taken place in the last three decades with respect to the process of family formation is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]