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The effects of cohort size on marriage markets in twentieth century Sweden
Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
David Lam, University of Michigan
This paper appeared in a 1989 volume edited by Tommy Bengtsson, called The Family the Market and the State in Industrialized Countries.
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ABSTRACT: Large, short-run fluctuations in the birth rate have been an important
demographic feature of industrialized, low-fertility populations in
the twentieth century. Since females normally marry men who are two or
three years older than themselves, these fluctuations result in large
imbalances between the size of male and female cohorts who would normally
marry each other. These imbalances must somehow be resolved, either by
a change in traditional patterns of age at marriage or by changes in the
proportions of the population of one sex or the other who ever marry.
Following a suggestion of Becker (1974,1981), we have developed a developed
an implementable general equilibrium model of marriage assignments, which
can be used to predict the way in which marriage patterns adjust to change
in the numbers of males and females in each cohort. This model poses
equilibrium in the marriage market as and application of the {\it linear
programming assignment problem}, which was introduced to economics by
Koopmans and Beckman (1987). For the purposes of this paper, we suppose
that persons of the same sex differ only by the year in which they were
born. Each individual has a preferred age of marriage. Any two people who
marry each other must, of course, marry at the same time. Therefore, the
total payoff to a marriage between any male and female is a function of
the age difference between them. The more their age difference diverges
from the difference between their preferred ages at marriage, the greater
the greater must be the loss of utility to one or both from marrying at an
age that is not ideal. If we posit a particular payoff structure to
marriages as a function of the age of marriage of each partner, then given
the size of each cohort, we can compute the optimal assignment of
marriage partners by cohort. The fit of the predicted assignments from our
model can then be compared with actual marriage patterns.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Ted Bergstrom and David Lam,
"The effects of cohort size on marriage markets in twentieth century Sweden"
(September 24, 1989).
Department of Economics, UCSB.
Ted Bergstrom.
Paper 1989.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucsbecon/bergstrom/1989
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