behavioral responses to laws governing the age of marriage using both administrative records from the Vital Statistics and … restrictive laws. Second, many young people appear to have evaded minimum age of marriage laws by misrepresenting age on their … marriage certificate. This avoidance was especially pronounced in earlier years, when few states required documented proof of …

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 …

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 …