Since 1950 the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women … specialization in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and … commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited …

Learning about marriage quality has been proposed as a key mechanism for explaining how the probability of divorce … evolves with marriage duration, and why people often cohabit before getting married. I develop four theoretical models of …, the data is consistent with a model without any learning, but where marriage quality changes over time …

marriage. We find that marriage rates increase sharply around the time of a move in an event study analysis. Reduced form … exposure analysis reveals that an additional move over a five year period increases the likelihood of marriage by 14 percent …-term intentions. These findings are consistent with a model where the marriage decision is costly and relocation lowers the costs to …

The last 60 years have seen the emergence of a dramatic socioeconomic gradient in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and … traditional gender-based specialization have declined, the value of marriage has decreased relative to cohabitation, which offers … less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. The resulting …