Reply to Comment on “The Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Different-Sex Marriage: Evidence From the Netherlands”

It has long been argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would have a negative impact on marriage. In this paper, I examine what happened to different-sex marriage in the Netherlands after the enactment of two laws: in 1998, a law that provided all couples with an institution almost identical to marriage—registered partnership—, and in 2001, a law that legalized same-sex marriage for the first time in the world. I construct a unique data set covering the period 1995–2005 by matching individuals from ten waves of the Dutch Labor Force Survey with their marriage and residence history from official records. I first estimate the first-marriage decision using a discrete-time hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity. I find that the marriage rate rose after the registered partnership law but fell after the same-sex marriage law. The effects of the two laws are heterogeneous: individuals in more liberal areas (the four largest cities) marry less after both laws, individuals in more conservative locations (the Dutch Bible belt) marry less after the registered partnership law but return to their long-term trend after the same-sex marriage law, and individuals outside these two regions exhibit the same pattern as the overall marriage rate. Next, I construct a synthetic control for the Netherlands as a weighted average of OECD member countries over the period 1988–2005. A comparison of the marriage rates in the Netherlands and the synthetic control confirms the findings from the individual-level analysis and a placebo test supports the validity of the results. The results suggest that same-sex marriage leads to a fall in the different-sex marriage rate, but not in the different-sex union (marriage plus registered partnership) rate. In contrast, same-sex registered partnership does not affect different-sex marriage negatively and the availability of an alternative institution increases the different-sex union rate.