The Changing Relationship Between Economic Resources and Marriage in the 21st Century

Daniel Schneider, University of California, Berkeley
José Aveldanes , University of California, Berkeley

The relationship between men’s and women’s economic resources and marriage has received a great deal of scholarly attention. While theory predicts that the association between economic resources and marriage may have changed across cohorts, very little research actually tests for cross-cohort change in this association. For women, we might expect that the relationship between economic resources and marriage became increasingly positive from the 1960s, though the change could have slowed with a “stalled revolution." For men, economic resources have long been an important prerequisite of marriage, but exposure to increasingly precarious work may have precipitated a still stronger relationship for recent cohorts. We draw on cross-cohort data from the PSID to estimate event history models that examine the association between economic resources and marriage for both men and women for cohorts born 1949-1991. We assess whether this association changed across cohorts and if the change differed for men and women.

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 Presented in Session 9. Marriage, Family, Households, & Unions; Gender, Race, & Ethnicity