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Title: Marriage Patterns of Black Women: Education, Competition, and the Shortage of Available Men
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: Black women who drop out of high school are far less likely to marry than those who do not. I hypothesize that these discrepancies are due to differences in the marriage markets women face at each education level. I motivate this with a simple model based on Becker (1981)’s work, which includes two key features: marriage markets that are integrated across education levels and positive assortative mating on education. This model predicts that the marriage prospects of any woman depend on both the total number of available black men at all education levels and the competition from more educated black women. Importantly, it predicts that any gender imbalance disproportionately affects the marriage prospects for the least educated. Using data from the 1979-2004 waves of the NLSY79, I estimate discrete-time hazard models of first marriages for black women, capturing a womans marriage prospects in three ways: (i) using an education-specific simple sex ratio from the educationally segmented marriage markets that dominate the literature, (ii) using a cascading sex ratio implied by Beckers model, and (iii) using a more flexible specification that includes separate measures for the relative availability of men as well as the prevalence of competing women at each edu- cation level. I find that: (i) marriage market measures that allow integration over education levels are better able to explain educational differences in marriage patterns than typical measures that assume independent marriage markets by education level, (ii) the effects of competition from other women are significant, and (iii) the supply of men has larger effects the more similar the education levels.
Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7353/7d66aa6363864d08d00e60cd1c5ab71f1bbf.pdf
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Authors: Staub, Kalina
Publisher: Department of Economics, Duke University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Gender
Countries: United States