On Population Structure and Marriage Dynamics

Abstract

I develop an equilibrium, two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age at …rst marriage of men and women. I show that, given an increase of the desired number of children, age at marriage is aected through two dierent channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from dierential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, young women become relatively less choosy than young men. In equilibrium, women are more likely to marry older men and single men outnumber single women. In the second part of the paper I extend the model to a …nite number of periods and, using fertility data, show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after a fertility shock like the baby boom in the U.S. Speci…cally, I show that demographic dynamics may account for up to a third of the increase in men's age of marriage since 1977. JEL Classi…cation: J12, D83.