Why Do American Women Work More Than Europeans?

According to economists Indraneel Chakraborty, Hans Holter, and Serhiy Stepanchuck, the answer lies in differences in divorce rates:

[W]e find a strong positive correlation between divorce rates and hours worked by women, whereas male hours and divorce rates are completely unrelated… 

Why would the likelihood of divorce affect the decision of females to work? 

We believe this is because marriage provides an implicit social insurance since the spouses are able to share their income. However, if divorce rates are higher in a society, women have a higher incentive to obtain work experience in case they find themselves alone in the future. The reason the incentive is higher is because in our data, women happen to be the second earner in the household more often than men. European women anticipate not getting divorced as often and hence find less reason to insure themselves by working as much as American women…  

We find that stable marriages lead to a reduction in labour supply. Both in the data and in the model the effect is on the extensive margin, i.e. whether women will choose to work or not. 

According to their research differences in tax rates also play a significant roll.

In our counterfactual economy, if just marriage stability in US were the same as in the European countries, it explains 24% of the cross-country variation in hours worked for females. When we also introduce European taxes, we are able to explain 43% of the variation in female work hours across the continents.

If this theory is correct, does that imply lower hours worked by American women who are at lower risk of divorce than the general population?  (Such as weekly church attenders and highly educated women.)

(HT Freakonomics)

In China, No Deed Means No Dates

The effects of gender imbalance or marriage markets gone awry?

Although there are few concrete ways to measure the scope of involuntary bachelorhood, more than 70 percent of single women in a recent survey said they would tie the knot only with a prospective husband who owned a home.

Among the qualities they seek in a mate, 50 percent said that financial considerations ranked above all else, with good morals and personality falling beneath the top three requirements. (Not surprisingly, 54 percent of single men ranked beauty first, according to the report, which surveyed 32,000 people and was jointly issued by the Chinese Research Association of Marriage and Family and the All-China Women’s Federation.)

The marriage competition is fierce, and statistically, women hold the cards. Given the nation’s gender imbalance, an outgrowth of a cultural preference for boys and China’s stringent family-planning policies, as many as 24 million men could be perpetual bachelors by 2020, according to the report.

Zhang Yanhong, a matchmaking consultant at Baihe, one of the country’s most popular dating sites, said many disheartened men had simply dropped out of the marriage market.

“This fixation on real estate has twisted the popular notion of love and marriage,” she said. “Women are putting economic factors above everything else when looking for a mate, and this is not a good thing for relationships or for society.”

The Economic Impact of Divorce

Russ Roberts:

Scott Sumner makes some interesting observations on how far we’ve come and the proposals  on the table today compared to 40 years ago. Along the way he talks about the economic problems of the 1970s and how growth rates dropped around the world. He then points out that it’s really hard to make thoughtful generalizations and how easy it is to leap to false conclusions, particularly about which policies worked and which didn’t. Of course, he is right.

But there is one change that took place in the 1970s that I think is under-appreciated by economists.

Divorce rates went up virtually everywhere in the 1970s. People also delayed getting married. Here is one source on the US data. Here is one on Europe. These are big changes, typically a doubling or more in divorce rates between 1960 and 1980.

These changes are typically ignored by economists. But I would expect such large changes to affect productivity and measured inequality. The latter point is that the explosion in divorce rates changed the number of households relative to population, so that looking at various quintiles or deciles over time became very misleading.

Little Known Statistics on Relationships

Interesting:

• The average man’s ideal woman is 60lbs lighter than him.
• A woman will get chatted up in bar 6 minutes faster if she is wearing make up.
• Last year 21% of dates were organized via e-mail and 5% of relationships were ended by text.
• 98% of Americans have experienced unrequited love.
• Ladies don’t drink more than 1.5 glasses of wine more than your date – a turn off for most men.
• For every $5000 extra a woman earns over her partner, their risk of divorce goes up by 5%.
• Over 2% of all heart attacks have been directly attributed to having a broken heart.
• Divorce has been proven to reduce a man’s life expectancy by 3.7 years.

Source is here via here.

What Would Men Do If They Didn’t Have to Impress Women?

Probably a whole lot of nothing:

What if a guy's job had no effect on his value in the marriage market? How would that affect a young man's career choices? He'd be a heck of a lot less ambitious:

This paper examines the extent to which human capital and career decisions are affected by their potential returns in the marriage market. Although schooling and career decisions often are made before getting married, these decisions are likely to affect the future chances of receiving a marriage offer, the type of offer, and the probability of getting divorced. Therefore, I estimate a forward‐looking model of the marriage and career decisions of young men between the ages of 16 and 39. The results show that if there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue‐collar jobs over white‐collar jobs. These findings suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market.

Source: "Marriage and Career: The Dynamic Decisions of Young Men" from "Journal of Human Capital"

Something to ponder: If you're a natural Casanova are you likely to be less ambitious? Or given the current demographics on college campuses, will we end up with a generation of male college grads who never really get out of first gear?

Other questions:

• Are men less likely to be ambitious in other populations where there are gender-imbalances in their favor?  (DC?  NY?  Religious groups?)  What about the opposite?  (China?  Silicon Valley?)
• Are men who cohabitate less ambitious than their marrying peers?  (He’s good enough to live with but not good enough to marry.)
• Do liberal divorce laws that favor women disincentivize men from marrying, decreasing their productivity?
• How much of the gender-gap in pay can be attributed to men trying to impress women with their income?

(HT Tyler Cowen)

The Right Man Is Getting Harder to Find?

Richard Whitmire, author of the blog “Why Boys Fail”, on what happens when fairy-tale dreams collide with the dreaded ‘operational sex-ratio.’

A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with "some college" are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970…

There's no single answer to the "why" question, but social scientists agree that the education mismatch Ms. Downtain experiences with men is a significant player behind the increase in college-educated women choosing single motherhood…

Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor's degrees and 62% of associate's degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can't find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.

Couple the education gap with the current economic "man-cession"—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to "marry down"?

Read the whole thing.

More Men Marrying Wealthier Women

Sam Roberts:

In 2007, the Pew report found, median household incomes of married men, married women and unmarried women were all about 60 percent higher than in 1970. But among unmarried men, median household income rose by only 16 percent. These days, men who marry typically gain another breadwinner.

In 1970, 28 percent of wives had husbands who were better educated, and 20 percent were married to men with less education. By 2007, the comparable figures were 19 percent and 28 percent. In 1970, 4 percent of husbands had wives who made more money; in 2007, 22 percent did.

College-educated wives are less likely to have a husband who is college-educated and in the highest income bracket than they were in 1970, and married women are less likely to have a husband who works.

Half a Man Is Better Than None?

What happens when there aren't enough men to go around:

Women in Siberia are lobbying to legalize polygamy, a Cambridge University anthropologist reports in The Guardian in London. The critical issue is demography. Population is falling and there are fewer men than women. Caroline Humphrey, the anthropologist, said: “Women say that the legalization of polygamy would be a godsend: it would give them rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.” Meanwhile, some Russian nationalists claim that introducing polygamy in the country would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women” and fill Mother Russia’s cradles.

This brings up the question of what would happen if there weren't enough women? Prostitution? Violence? War? Migration? Somehow, polyandry (one wife with many husbands) has never seemed to work too well.

If polygamy is legalized, it might have the same effect as suddenly reducing the number of women in the population. As many women would likely flock to the more successful men, it would leave poorer men in the lurch -- creating a gender-imbalance in the opposite direction.

(HT Richard Whitmire)

Divorce

The percentage of married population now divorced or separated by age.


Click chart for larger view.

(HT Fancy Stats via Dustin)

No Toilet? No Bride!

In India, prospective brides have a new seat of power:

An ideal groom in this dusty farming village is a vegetarian, does not drink, has good prospects for a stable job and promises his bride-to-be an amenity in high demand: a toilet.

In rural India, many young women are refusing to marry unless the suitor furnishes their future home with a bathroom, freeing them from the inconvenience and embarrassment of using community toilets or squatting in fields.

About 665 million people in India -- about half the population -- lack access to latrines. But since a "No Toilet, No Bride" campaign started about two years ago, 1.4 million toilets have been built here in the northern state of Haryana, some with government funds, according to the state's health department.

Women's rights activists call the program a revolution as it spreads across India's vast and largely impoverished rural areas.

And what is it that has given these women this much bargaining power?

A societal preference for boys here has become an unlikely source of power for Indian women. The abortion of female fetuses in favor of sons — an illegal but widespread practice — means there are more eligible bachelors than potential brides, allowing women and their parents to be more selective when arranging a match.

Son preference is exhibited in several parts of Asia and is even showing up among certain Asian groups in the United States. (See this graph.)

In general, more boys than girls are born in the United States, by a ratio of 1.05 to 1. But among American families of Chinese, Korean and Indian descent, the likelihood of having a boy increased to 1.17 to 1 if the first child was a girl, according to the Columbia economists. If the first two children were girls, the ratio for a third child was 1.51 to 1 — or about 50 percent greater — in favor of boys.

Studies have not detected a similar preference for males among Japanese-Americans.

It looks like the sex-ratio at birth among Chinese-Americans is similar to to that of China overall -- approximately 1.25 boys born for every girl. This is already creating a huge demographic time-bomb in China. With Asian-American women being the most likely people group to have an interracial marriage, these trends in the US may become increasingly problematic for Asian-American men as well.

With selective abortions of female fetuses among certain populations in the US, easy access to abortion appears to have a disproportionate impact on the gender it was claimed to protect.

(HT Stephen Dubner)

I Do, I Do, I Do: Mapping Serial Marriage

Lots of ex's live in Texas?

The Pew Research Center recently released an analysis of data on marriage and divorce rates by state. The numbers are primarily drawn from Census Bureau surveys. An interactive map of the data is here.

Follow the link for an overview of many sobering statistics and see the Pew Research Center's website for much more data and an interactive map which has data for each state showing percentage of population currently married, percent divorce, median age at first marriage, and percentage married three times or more.

DC currently has the lowest rate of people currently married and the highest average age at first marriage.

The Probability of Marrying Well?

Is it all just a numbers game?

Suppose you are told you must marry, and that you must choose your spouse out of 100 applicants. You may interview each applicant once. After each interview you must decide whether to marry that person. If you decline, you lose the opportunity forever. If you work your way through 99 applicants without choosing one, you must marry the 100th. You may think you have 1 in 100 chance of marrying your ideal partner, but the truth is that you can do a lot better than that.

If you interview half the potential partners then stop at the next best one - that is, the first one better than the best person you've already interviewed - you will marry the very best candidate about 25 per cent of the time. Once again, probability explains why. A quarter of the time, the second best partner will be in the first 50 people and the very best in the second. So 25 per cent of the time, the rule "stop at the next best one" will see you marrying the best candidate. Much of the rest of the time, you will end up marrying the 100th person, who has a 1 in 100 chance of being the worst, but hey, this is probability, not certainty.

You can do even better than 25 per cent, however. John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University proved that you could raise your odds to 37 per cent by interviewing 37 people then stopping at the next best. The number 37 comes from dividing 100 by e, the base of the natural logarithms, which is roughly equal to 2.72. Gilbert and Mosteller's law works no matter how many candidates there are - you simply divide the number of options by e.

(HT Tyler Cowen)

Marriage Markets, Japanese Style

Fad or crisis? Japan’s ‘marriage hunting’ craze:

The twenty- to forty-somethings are part of a new fad sweeping Japan: “konkatsu” or “marriage-hunting,” a word play on “job hunting” that suggests finding Mr or Mrs Right is a matter of good research and thorough planning.

This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.

A Tokyo shrine now offers konkatsu prayer services, a Hokkaido baseball team has set up special seats for those looking for mates, and a Tokyo ward office arranges dating excursions to restaurants and aquariums.

A lingerie maker has even come up with a konkatsu bra with a ticking clock that can be stopped by inserting an engagement ring.

Japan – known for its strong work ethic that can squeeze social time, and for its declining birth rates – seems to be getting its mojo back.

It remains to be seen if Japan has truly gotten it's "mojo" back. The only evidence of this will be increasing marriage and/or birth rates.

Social observers see a variety of reasons for konkatsu’s popularity, including Japan’s current recession which may be leading some women to choose marriage over career in a search for financial stability.

Japan’s government has thrown its support behind konkatsu to boost the birth rate of just 1.37 children per woman, hoping to slow the decline of the ageing population, which is projected to shrink nearly 30 percent by 2055.

An advisory panel to the cabinet last month proposed a 10-point plan to raise the low birth rate, including the promotion of “love and marriage", possibly by organising matchmaking events.

If there are underlying economic realities such as increasing costs of raising children, greater economic opportunity for women (increasing their opportunity cost both for having children and entering traditional marriage), etc., then government programs will probably only have limited effect.

Here is why this is such an important issue for Japan:

Marriage rates have fallen sharply between 1975 and 2005 – from 85 percent to 51 percent for men aged 30 to 34, and from 90 percent to 63 percent for women of the same age, according to census data.

“Currently some 4,000 match-making agencies do business in Japan, with a total membership of some 620,000,” she said. “About half of local governments also give similar matching services, especially in rural farming areas.

"But the successful mating rate through such an agency stays as low as eight percent,” she added. “People don’t have communication skills good enough to find a partner, no matter how many candidates they meet.

“Konkatsu is not a bad thing,” she said. “But we need to study what brought the marriage crisis to the country in the first place.”

Increasing costs for having/raising kids combined with strong norms for traditional gender roles in marriage and increasing economic opportunity for women may have something to do with it. As the opportunity cost for women entering marriage increases and they are better able to support themselves independently, traditional gender roles may look increasingly bad causing a decrease in female demand for marriage. While this is not a full explanation, I think these forces help give a partial explanation for these trends.

(HT Tyler Cowen)

A Sobering Statistic

I was doing some research using the General Social Survey for a paper and came across the following statistic. Approximately 54% of black women under the age of 49 have never been married. And black men don't fare much better:



The number decreases to 43.3% if you restrict that range to 29 to 49 year olds, with white women in the same age range having less than one-third (13.5%) the likelihood of having never been married.



Putting this into a more graphical form:



I've heard some of my younger classmates argue before that marriage is an unnecessary institution. Putting moral arguments aside for a moment, the reality is that (among other things) a lack of marriage leads to poverty. And a shortage of black men leads to a lack of marriage among black women. This is very, very sad.

Is There an Ideal Age for Marriage?

Marry too early and you run the risk of making yourself poor, losing out on educational opportunities, and increasing the likelihood of divorce. Marry too late and you run the risk of difficulties conceiving children, getting set in your ways, ending up past your prime on the marriage market, and feeling like you might get stuck being single for the rest of your life.

Below is a look at what others have to say and what the world actually does when it comes to marriage. Lots of graphs follow.

A brief summary of some of the data:

• Women consistently marry at younger ages on average than men do. This is true in every nation worldwide.
  
• The average age at first marriage in the US has changed over the last century -- first going down and then going up. It is now at its historical high. (A factor contributing to the increase in age could be a substitution effect of couples living together in their 20s after advances in birth control.)
  
• Americans marry young in comparison with other developed countries.
• According to 2006 US Census data, approximately 2 out of every 3 men, and 3 out of every 4 women marry by age 34. The numbers increase to 4 out of every 5 men and 7 out of 8 women by age 44. (Women marrying older men and/or men having a greater propensity for remarriage after divorce could account for the ratio difference between genders.)
  
• In the US, there does seem to be some correlation between marrying young (early 20s) and higher divorce rates. (This could be due to cultural, economic, educational, and/or legal differences among the states.)
  

Research on the effects of age at first marriage appears to be mixed:

[A]s young people wait longer to marry, there is growing debate over whether waiting is a good idea, and if so, how long is best. Those who advocate marriage in the early to mid-20s say that's the age when the pool of possible mates is larger, it's when couples can "grow up" together and it's prime for childbearing. But others favor the late 20s or early 30s, saying maturity makes for happier unions and greater economic security — both of which make divorce less likely.

As a result, researchers, sociologists and family experts are taking a closer look at the attitudes behind the trend to see if there really is an optimum age to marry that maximizes the benefits of matrimony and minimizes possible problems...

It's well documented that those who marry before age 20 are two to three times more likely to divorce, researchers say. But studies are still trying to determine whether marrying at certain ages may improve relationships and help marriages survive.

A study being drafted by sociologist Norval Glenn of the University of Texas-Austin finds that those who marry in the early to mid-20s are slightly happier and less likely to break up than those who marry in the later 20s, but are significantly more satisfied with their relationships than those who marry at 30 or older...

But research by sociologist Paul Amato of Pennsylvania State University for a 2007 book he co-wrote suggests quite the opposite. The studies for Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing used different data and different criteria and found distinct benefits to marrying older.

"We found that the delay in marriage was actually a good thing and it actually improved the average marital quality by a fair amount," he says.

"Older marriages (30s vs. 20s) were more cohesive in the sense they did things more often together as a couple. And couples who married at older ages were less likely to report thinking about divorce or that their marriage was in trouble."

It seems everyone who is trying to turn love into a science is just as confused as the rest of us.

While most appear to think marrying in mid-to-late-twenties is best, people who find themselves still single should not give up hope. Many find love and marriage after age 45.

My take aways:

1) There is large heterogeneity in individuals and in matches in the marriage market. Both you and your story are unique, so don't fret too much if your life has turned out differently from these medians.

2) If you're over the age of 25 and meet someone you love, trust, and are compatible with, don't hesitate to get married.

3) If you're older than 25 and want to get married, don't give up hope no matter what age you are. While it's never too late, sooner is probably better than later past this point, so start looking!

Graphs:

Below are some graphs that I made/found from various sources of marriage statistics in the US and from around the world.

Percent of Americans never married, 2006:



Median age at first marriage in the US, 1890-2007:


Average age of first marriage and divorce rates:



Here is what the difference between males and females in average age at marriage looks like globally. Wikipedia has more statistics on age at first marriage around the world. If anything, the US appears to marry young relative to the rest of the world -- both men and women.

Is Living Out West Bad for Marriage?

(via American Ethnic Geography)

Men Aren't Afraid of Marriage

But they are afraid of a bad marriage:

Weisman, 49, conducted a survey of 1,533 heterosexual men to research a book aiming to give women an insight into why some smart, successful men opted to stay single -- and help lifelong bachelors understand why they are still the solo man at parties.

He concluded that most men were not afraid of marriage -- but they were afraid of a bad marriage.

"Men are 10 times more scared of marrying the wrong person than of never getting married at all,"...

Weisman said U.S. figures showed that in 1980 about 6 percent of men aged in their early 40s had never married but this number had now risen to 17 percent.

(HT Dr. Helen)

Why Is Monogamy Associated With Economic Development?

Tyler Cowen:

Eric Gould, Omer Moav and Avi Simhon offer a new answer in the March 2008 American Economic Review: female inequality. Economic growth means that some women have higher human capital than others and thus they are better suited at producing and rearing high quality children. Wealthy men with lots of human capital will start to bid for these women and they will have to offer them exclusive status; these men also wish to invest in a smaller number of higher quality children.

In other words, male inequality encourages polygamy while female inequality discourages it. Apparently female inequality has been winning that race.

The hypothesis also helps explain why polygamy unravels so decisively at some point. Since monogamy itself encourages children (including daughters) with higher human capital, initial tendencies toward monogamy are self-reinforcing.

Here is an earlier ungated version of the paper. Or buy the new version here for $7.50. Here are previous MR posts on polygamy.

Why Are There So Few Eligible Bachelors?

How economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men. (I'm still trying to figure out what this says about me...)

...game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal. You can find a technical discussion of this here. (Be warned: "Bidding Behavior in Asymmetric Auctions" is not for everyone, and I certainly won't claim to have a handle on all the math.) But you can also see how this works intuitively if you just consider that with a lot at stake in getting it right in one shot, it's the women who are confident that they are holding a strong hand who are likely to hold out and wait for the perfect prospect.

This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders."

Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Tyler Cowen doesn't quite buy it:

I view the real world auction as being held -- at least if you wish -- continuously rather than at discrete times. So the "strong bidding women" can always cave and settle for a "lesser man" after an optimal amount of waiting, yet many don't. The distinction between period-by-period happiness and overall lifetime happiness also shapes the market. As smart single women mature, their lives get better and better. "Settling" becomes psychologically harder, even if it would make some of the "settlers" happy in the longer run. So settling doesn't happen; decisiveness become harder to conjure up at the same time that its long-run value is increasing, or in other words behavioral economics is very much at work here.

(HT Richard Florida)

The Marriage Crunch?

What are the chances of getting married after you turn 40?

When the Census last crunched the numbers in 1996, a single woman at 40 had a 40.8 percent chance of eventually marrying. Today those odds are probably even higher–and may be only slightly worse than the probability of correctly choosing “heads” or “tails” in a coin toss.

I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news? The article is contrasting this to a 2.5% chance Newsweek reported 20 years ago. On a positive note, these figures seem to lump together women who do want to get married and those who don't. The numbers should be higher for those women who do want to get married.

I wonder what the odds are for men? My guess is that they are somewhat higher, although possibly not by that much.

Read more on this here, here, and here.

This data reinforces advice I've given before: Spend your twenties doing whatever it takes to figure out what you want to do with your life and who you want to spend it with. If you didn't do that in your twenties, start as soon as possible. Don't be afraid of trial and error on either front. That's how you discover.

Richard Florida would also argue choosing a place to live is just as important as finding a spouse.