Full Citation
Title: Marrying for Money: Evidence from Changes in Marital Property Laws in the U.S. South, 1840-1850
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2015
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Abstract: One way in which marriage generates value is by allowing couples to pool property for the purposes of risk sharing and investment. This dimension of marriage has received little attention in the literature, in part because it is difficult to separate this effect from the gains from division of labor within the household. We measure the impact of a class of married womens property laws introduced in the American South during the 1840s on family investment and assortative matching in the marriage market. These laws did not grant married women autonomy over their separate property; they merely shielded this property from seizure by their husbands creditors. This had the dual effect of mitigating downside risk while restricting a husbands ability to borrow against his wifes property; it also preserved the bulk of the wifes property as an inheritance for the couples children. As such, these laws affected a couples ability to pool property and access credit without affecting the relative bargaining position of husbands and wives; this allows us to shed light on the importance of property in the marriage market. Using a newly compiled database of linked marriage and census records, we show that these property laws increased investment when the bulk of a couples property was owned by the husband; however, they had the inverse effect when most of a couples property was owned by the wife. In addition, we show that assortative matching on wealth declined after the passage of these laws, while assortative matching on age increased.
Url: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/koudijs_oct_21.pdf
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Authors: Koudijs, Pete; Salisbury, Laura
Publisher: Stanford University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Other
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