Arun Hendi - Duke University
One Half Century of American Marriage and Divorce
Date: 10/22/2015 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 270
Organizer: Laura Satterfield
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: ABSTRACT: This study traces out the evolution of American marriage between 1960 and 2010. First, I attempt to reconcile conflicting conclusions in the literature about recent trends in marriage and divorce. I then develop and extend two-sex models of the marital life cycle to quantify how changes in marriage, divorce, mortality, assortative mating, and the education distribution have shaped marital life cycles over the past half-century. I show that while the probability of ever-marrying has continued to decline between the 1980s and 2010, the probability that a first marriage ends in divorce has increased only slightly over the same period. There has been an educational divergence in marriage and divorce, which has become especially pronounced since 1988. I demonstrate that much of the truncation since 1960 in length of first marriage can be attributed to later age at marriage and higher rates of divorce, but that in recent years this is partly offset by narrowing sex differences in mortality and more intense educational assortative mating.