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This paper has not been published. It was presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America. We intended to do more work on this one, but never got back to it. We did publish a related paper on marriage markets in Sweden.

Download the Paper (552 K, PDF file) - July 24, 1989 Tell a colleague about it. Printing Tips: Select 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog if you have trouble printing.

ABSTRACT:
We develop a model of marriage market equilibrium that can be used to study effects of the age distribution of men and women on marriage patterns. The model clarifies issues in the literature such as the two-sex problem and the marriage squeeze. In particular, the fact that women tend to marry men who are older than they implies that when cohort sizes fluctuate, there are shifts in relative supply and demand of marriage partners of the two sexes. We consider age difference between spouses as an equilibrating mechanism in marriage markets. The model follows Becker's application of the Koopmans-Beckman assignment model to marriage markets. We show that even large differences in cohort sizes can be absorbed by relatively small changes in the age differential of spouses, with no necessary changes in the proportion of men and women ever marrying.

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Ted Bergstrom and David Lam, "The Two-Sex Problem and the Marriage Squeeze in an Equilibrium Model of Marriage Markets" (July 24, 1989). Department of Economics, UCSB. Ted Bergstrom. Paper 1989C.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucsbecon/bergstrom/1989C