1 / 15

Modeling a Marriage Squeeze

Modeling a Marriage Squeeze. Cristina B., Chris Glazner , Nathan Wang, Cristina M. Marriage as a process. At any certain point in time, a number of males and females look for a marriage partner.

byron
Download Presentation

Modeling a Marriage Squeeze

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Modeling a Marriage Squeeze Cristina B., Chris Glazner, Nathan Wang, Cristina M.

  2. Marriage as a process • At any certain point in time, a number of males and females look for a marriage partner. • Marriage matching is not a random, but a constrained process optimization with the future chosen partner being the one maximizing the constraints imposed.

  3. Marriage as a system • In a society with low level of social change, marriage patterns change very little from one year to another in terms of: • Age at first marriage • Percentage of women married by age 45 • Husband/ wife age patterns (difference in age between husband and wife) • If a consistent pattern of change in marriage is observed, this is interpreted as a sign of ideational change (Lesthaeghe 1983)

  4. Marriage as a process • Men and women look for mates with certain characteristics such as • age • education • Income • health status • ethnicity/race; • Income • but they have to choose their partners from a defined array of available choices

  5. Marriage as a process • Nuptiality patterns observed in a certain population at a particular point in time can then be then described as the result of two components (Schoen, 1981): • marriage preferences (degrees of attraction between males and females from certain age, educational, racial, ethnic groups • availability of partners within these groups

  6. Problem • The general perspective in demography is that attraction forces are fixed/constant (Schoen 1988) • Some disagree: they think that at least some of these attraction forces are flexible within certain limits (Ni Bhrolchain 2001) • Ex. Although most women in a population marry men who are 1-3 years older, this is a result of meeting opportunities, not forces of attraction.

  7. Test case: marriage squeeze • Generally, the number of men and women looking for a partner is balanced because the number of births increases or decreases slowly most of the time (Keilman 1985). • When the availability of partners in some groups is restricted (Schoen 1988), a marriage squeeze occurs.

  8. Marriage squeeze factors • War (large number of marriage age men are killed) • Immigration and emigration (an unbalanced number of young men or women enter into or leave a population) • Population policies (number of births suddenly increase or decrease leading to larger cohorts on the marriage market) • Education level increase (more educated women on a marriage market with not enough potential partners)

  9. Real life studies: mixed results • Henry (1966): France, WWI. Expected results: fewer women married. No. • Saxena & all (2004): Lebanon, war and emigration. Expected results: fewer women married. Yes. • Goodkind (1997): Vietnam, emigration. Expected results: fewer women married. Yes. • South and Lloyd (1992): US, African American community. Expected results: fewer women married. Yes.

  10. Real life studies: mixed results • Raymoand Iwasawa (2005): Japan, education level increases. Expected result: fewer women married. Yes. • Bradatan (2009): Romania, population policy. Expected results: fewer women married. No. • Qianand Preston (1993): US, education level increases. Expected results: fewer women married. Yes and No.

  11. Research questions • How to disentangle the effect of ideational change from the effect of population structure on the marriage system? • Are age marriage patterns really fixed? • Are education marriage patterns really fixed?

  12. Agent based simulation model • How do people decide to marry a particular person at a particular point in time?

  13. Agent based simulation model

  14. Constraints • Age at first marriage for all agents needs to be unimodal right skewed • Between 80-100% of all agents need to be married • There should be a significant correlation (0.4-0.6) between husband and wife attractiveness

  15. Expected results • With agent based models we can distinguish between ideational changes (changes in the marriage pressure) and changes in the population structure • Age marriage patterns are not fixed • Changes in education level are associated with ideational changes: marriage pressure decreases. Lower levels of marriage are not necessarily the result of the marriage squeeze.

More Related