Over time and across societies women tend to marry older men. In the United States, the age gap at first marriage was 1.82 years in the year 2000. Two facts that are probably less well known are that the life-cycle profiles of the age gaps at first marriage, defined as someone’s age minus the age of his or her spouse, are increasing both for the brides and for the grooms, and that they are steeper for the grooms. In Panels A and B of Figure 1, we report these facts for the United States in 1995. Those two panels show that when first time grooms marry before age 20, they do so on average to an older bride.
But first time grooms who are over 20 marry to brides who are younger than they are, and the average age gap at marriage increases continuously with the groom’s age. For example, a 40 year old first time groom married a bride who was six years younger on average, if we restrict the sample to first time brides. Interestingly, this pattern is similar for the brides. First time brides who married before age 20, did so to grooms who were 3 or 4 years older on average. In contrast, when they married around 40, they did so to grooms who were on average two years younger, if we restrict the sample to first time grooms.
The traditional story to acco unt for these facts, is related to gender specialization and to the role of males as “providers”. It essentially describes marriage as a waiting game in which young women are scarce and choosy, and old and rich pretenders outbid the young and poor ones in their competition for young and fecund women. A more recent version of this story is that marriage is an “exchange of money for beauty”, which can be applied also to women who marry younger men.
In this article we argue that the gender differences in the life-cycle profiles of income are an unlikely explanation of either of the average age gaps at first marriage, or of their increasing life-cycle profiles. Instead, we show that the age gaps at first marriage depend crucially on gender differences in fecundity, and that their increasing life-cycle profiles are essentially a general equilibrium effect generated by the age distributions of singles which are endogenous in our model economies.
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Gender Differences and the Timing of First Marriages
