TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom,David E.
AU  - Bennett,Neil G.
TI  - Marriage Patterns in the United States
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 1701
PY  - 1985
Y2  - September 1985
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1701
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1701.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David E. Bloom
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-0866
Fax: 617/432-6733
E-Mail: dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu

Neil G. Bennett
Baruch College/
CUNY Institute for Demographic Research
Box D-901
One Bernard Baruch Way
New York, NY  10010
Tel: 646/660-6779
Fax: 646/660-6784
E-Mail: Neil.Bennett@baruch.cuny.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1986-01-01
AB  - This paper analyzes cohort marriage patterns in the United States in order to determine whether declining rates of first marriage are due to changes in the timing of marriage, the incidence of marriage, or both. Parametric models, which are well-suited to the analysis of censored or truncated data, are fit separately to information on age at first marriage derived from three data sets which were collected independently and at different points in time. Extended versions of the models are also estimated in which the parameters of the model distributions are allowed to depend on social and, economic variables.The results provide evidence that the incidence of first marriage is declining and that there is only a slight tendency for women to delay marriage. In addition, education is the most important correlate of decisions about the timing of first marriage whereas race is the most important correlate of decisions about its incidence.
ER  -