A More Measured Approach: An Evaluation of Different Measures of Marriage Rates and Implications for Family Economics

PWP-CCPR-2018-003

Abstract

Marriage patterns can be well understood only if researchers employ mea-sures of marriage rates that are appropriate for the question asked. In this paper, we consider different measures of marriage rates and provide evidence that the two classes of measures typically used in the literature, the number of new marriages per population and the share of individuals currently or ever married within an age range, generally lead to misleading inference when used to study the probability that someone marries during his or her life or fertile life, how it evolves, and how it differs across populations. An alternative mea-sure, the share of individuals ever married in a given cohort by a given age, is better suited for such studies. We also document that, in cases when researchers are interested in year-on-year changes in marriage probabilities of singles rather than the share that ever marry, age-specific marriage hazards are more reliable than population-based measures. We conclude the paper by discussing the im-plications of our findings for studies of the drivers and consequences of marriage formation.