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Premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital

  • Gender Relations
  • Published:
Demography

Abstract

Married couples who began their relationship by cohabiting appear to face an increased risk of marital dissolution, which may be due to self-selection of more dissolution-prone individuals into cohabitation before marriage. This paper uses newly developed econometric methods to explicitly address the endogeneity of cohabitation before marriage in the hazard of marital disruption by allowing the unobserved heterogeneity components to be correlated across the decisions to cohabit and to end a marriage. These methods are applied to data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. We find significant heterogeneity in both cohabitation and marriage disruption, and discover evidence of self-selection into cohabitation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RAND, 1700 Main Street, 90407, Santa Monica, CA

    Lee A. Lillard

  2. Department of Economics, University of Virginia, 114 Rouss Hall, 22903, Charlottesville, VA

    Michael J. Brien

  3. Population Research Center, NORC and the University of Chicago, 1155 E. 60th Street, 60637, Chicago, IL

    Linda J. Waite

Authors
  1. Lee A. Lillard
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  2. Michael J. Brien
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  3. Linda J. Waite
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Additional information

This research was supported by Grant P-50-12639 from the Center for Population Research, NICHD. We want to thank Constantijn W. A. Panis for helpful discussions. The software for this application was developed by Lee Lillard and Constantijn Panis. We want to recognize Richard Baumann for assistance in developing the event history data.

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Lillard, L.A., Brien, M.J. & Waite, L.J. Premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital. Demography 32, 437–457 (1995). https://doi.org/10.2307/2061690

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