NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Modeling American Marriage Patterns

David E. Bloom, Neil G. Bennett

NBER Working Paper No. 3425*
Issued in August 1990

This paper investigates the application of the three-parameter, Coale-

McNeil marriage model and some related hyper-parameterized specifications to

data on the first marriage patterns of American women. Because the model is

parametric, it can be used to estimate the parameters of the marriage

process, free of censoring bias, for cohorts that have yet to complete their

first marriage experience. Empirical evidence from three surveys is reported

on the ability of the model to replicate and project observed marriage

behavior. The results indicate that the model can be a useful tool for

analyzing cohort marriage data and that recent cohorts are showing relatively

strong proclivities to both delay and forego marriage. Consistent with

earlier work, the results also indicate that education is a powerful

covariate of the timing of first marriage and that race is a powerful

covariate of its incidence.

*Published: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol 85, No. 412, December 1990.

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