PDF Ebook Does Marriage Make People Happy, or Do Happy People Get Married?
Marriage is one of the most important institutions ffecting people’s life and well-being. Marital institutions regulate sexual relations and encourage commitment between spouses. This commitment has positive effects, for instance on spouses’ health and their earnings on the labor market.
In this paper, we directly look at the effect of marriage on spouses’ happiness as measured in an extensive panel survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel, with data on reported subjective well-being. This allows us to analyze whether marriage makes people happy, or whether happy people are more likely to get married. We want to go beyond the numerous previous studies that document that married people are happier than singles and those living in cohabitation (e.g. Myers 1999). We have two main interests in this paper: One goal is to provide systematic evidence on who benefits more and who benefits less from marriage. This evidence helps in assessing the crucial auxiliary assumption in models of the marriage market. Becker’s seminal work on the economics of marriage (1973, 1974) 1 is based on the gains married people get from household production and labor division. Other theories focus on spouses’ joint consumption of household public goods or on reciprocity and social equality in homogamous 2 relationships. In the latter case, it is argued that the tendency for “like to marry like” facilitates compatibility of spouses’ basic values and beliefs. Our empirical analysis studies whether couples with different degrees of potential and actual specialization of labor and more or less difference in education systematically differ in their benefits from marriage.
It is not our intent to recommend whether people should or should not marry. Rather, we intend to contribute to the public discussion about the value of intact marriages and legislators’ debates about marriage penalties in tax codes, or the effect of welfare programs and social security on marriage. Moreover, empirical evidence on different couples’ utility levels helps us to better understand the sources of well-being in marriage. The empirical analysis is challenged by the question of causality. Does marriage make people happier or is marriage just more likely for happier people? The second goal of our analysis is to address the question of selection. So far, there is no large-scale evidence on the role of selection in the relation between marriage and happiness. In a longitudinal data set, we compare singles who remain single with singles who marry later as well as with people who are already married.
In a panel spanning a period of 17 years, we find that selection of happier people into marriage is pronounced for those who marry when they are young and again becomes an important factor for those who marry later in life. Moreover, a retrospective evaluation shows that those who get divorced were already less happy when they were newly married and when they were still single. This indicates substantial selection effects of generally less happy individuals into the group of divorced people.
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PDF Ebook Does Marriage Make People Happy, or Do Happy People Get Married?
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