Measuring the tightness of a marriage squeeze

Abstract

The "marriage squeeze," or the effect on marriage of an imbalance between the numbers of males and females, has been seen as having a great influence on contemporary marriage behavior. Nonetheless, the literature does not contain a clear definition of exactly what a marriage squeeze is and contains few quantitative estimates of its impact on marriage. The present article provides a precise definition of the marriage squeeze in equation (2), and applies it to measure both artificially produced marriage squeezes in two-sex nuptiality stable populations and the experience of the United States during the period 1950-1990. The marriage squeeze is shown to be capable of producing significant changes in both the level and distribution of marriage, and it appears to be having such an impact in some contemporary Third World societies. For developed countries in general and for the United States in particular, the marriage squeeze exerts little influence on the level of marriage but has a considerable effect on the distribution of marriages. The U.S. age-sex composition of the year 1978, compared to that of the year 1951, is shown to imply a 0.54 year decrease in the male mean age at marriage and a 0.53 year increase in the female mean age at marriage, as well as an 18 percent reduction in the variance of the male ages at marriage and a 33 percent increase in the variance of the female ages. The social and economic implications of such changes have yet to be fully explored.