Declining Marriage Ratios of Young Black Women: Testing Alternative Economic Hypotheses

Modeled in the choicetheoretic framework favored by economists, a mar- riage results when two parties have determined that marriage to the other is pre- ferred to the alternatives. A secular rise in the proportion of young adults living outside the institution of marriage (interpreted as a market-clearing phenome- non) is therefore explained by a corresponding reduction in welfare-improving marriage opportunities for this population. Such a trend is likely to have man- ifold social and economic repercussions—some of which may be deleterious. 1 Thus it is important to ask: What economic factors might explain why a sharply increased proportion of young adults have evidently been unable to find a util- ity-enhancing marital choice? The purpose of this article is to submit alternative economic explanations of falling marriage ratios of young, black females (ages 22 to 34) to econo- metric investigation. (For purposes of this investigation, a marriage ratio is defined as the proportion of individuals in a specified class that are married.) Two hypotheses to account for the decrease in marriage among young black women are appraised. The market opportunity (MO) hypothesis finds the cause of declining marriage in a secular rise in the (relative) rate of return to women's investment in market-specialized human capital. The man shortage (MS) hypothesis explains ebbing marriage ratios by a diminution over time of the population of economically qualified men of marrying age. A vector autore- gression (VAR) model is specified and estimating using time series variables constructed from public use microdata for the period 1965-2003. The article is organized in five sections. Section 2 develops the theoretical arguments concerning marriage rates. The methodology employed to test the respective theories is described in Section 3. Results are reported and discussed in Section 4. Concluding remarks are contained in Section 5.