Living arrangements have undergone considerable change in recent decades. In most Western countries marriage is no longer the exclusive context of family formation. In the United States (US) for instance, the number of unmarried couples nearly doubled in the 1990s, from 3:2 million couples in...

This paper complements conventional economic analysis and presents a social norms interpretation to explain cross-country differences in partnership formation rates, and the dramatic decrease in partnership formation rates in Southern Europe in particular. We argue that increases in female human...