Abstract
We investigate how changes in the sex ratio induced by World War II affected the bargaining patterns of Italian men in the marriage market after the war. Marriage data from the first wave of the Italian Household Longitudinal Survey (1997) are matched with newly digitized information on war casualties coming from Italian National Bureau of Statistics. We find that men in post-war marriages were better off in terms of their spouse’s education, this gain amounting to about half a year of education. By considering heterogeneity across provinces, we find that the effects were more pronounced in more rural provinces, mountainous provinces, and those with a higher share of population employed in agriculture. This suggests that here, the shock provided for a more fundamental change in marriage patterns compared to urban, lower-lying, and less agricultural provinces where marriage markets might have been more flexible to begin with.
Highlights
Wars have consequences beyond the immediate short-term loss of lives and destruction of houses and infrastructures
We study the consequences of such imbalance in sex ratios on marriage patterns using a newly assembled dataset for Italy after World War II (WWII )
A first source of heterogeneity may stem from the fact that while in rural areas individuals were constrained to meet fewer potential marriage partners, urban areas were characterized by more dynamic inter-personal relationships and may in principle offer more scope to take advantage of fewer males on the marriage market
Summary
Wars have consequences beyond the immediate short-term loss of lives and destruction of houses and infrastructures. We study the consequences of such imbalance in sex ratios on marriage patterns using a newly assembled dataset for Italy after World War II (WWII ). Brainerd (2017) studies the effects of unbalanced sex ratios in Russia after WWII on women’s marital, fertility, and health outcomes Her analysis shows that women facing lower sex ratios experienced lower marriage rates and an increase in out-of-wedlock births and abortions. They look into the consequences of World War I on marriage patterns in France They find that after the war and in regions with higher mortality rates, men were less likely to marry women of lower social classes and the age gap decreased..
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