Wharton study connects marriage and markets

For female students at Penn, choosing to come to college might reduce their odds of getting married.

But there may be a silver lining. The odds are improving, with more college-educated women getting married now than in the past, according to research done by Wharton Business and Public Policy Department professor Betsey Stevenson and doctoral student Adam Isen.

In 1950, 74 percent of college-educated white women had married by the age of 40, compared to 90 percent of their high school graduate counterparts.

This figure grew to 86 percent by 2008, much closer to the 88 percent of high school graduate white women.

Isen said the choice of study reflects the overall broadening focus of economics.

“In the past, people associated economics with studying markets and money,” he said, explaining that the field has recently begun to include social spheres of life.

“It’s important to think about family behavior in the context of economic behavior and markets — they all go together.”

Stevenson agreed, saying she does research to understand the intersection of work and family, and how family situation affects the incentive to be employed, and vice versa.

It’s all about making choices, she said.

“Public policy affects the incentive to be in the workforce — incentives interact with families.”

According to the two researchers, the overall fall in marriage rates and smaller difference between the 1950 and 2008 groups that the study found can be explained in part by the departure from the “specialized” model of marriage, under which men focus on the workforce and women on the home.

“With opportunities for women in the labor market opening up, it’s become more costly to have a specialized homemaker,” Stevenson said.

She and Isen explained that increasing access to education and higher wage rates for women have increased the cost for women of staying at home.

“In relative terms, women have less interest in and less perceived benefits from marriage” than previously, Isen said.

On the other hand, Demie Kurz, a sociology professor and co-director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, said college-educated women’s lower divorce rate is surprising. Based on financial cost, many would expect college-educated women to have a higher divorce rate than their less-educated peers, she added.

“The financial cost of leaving a marriage is much less if [women] have college degree or graduate degree and can earn more money,” Kurz said.

The study’s other findings suggest that college-educated women are more likely to stay married than less-educated ones, but are less likely to remarry.

“One big correlation,” Isen said, “is that people who enter into marriages at a later age are less likely to get divorced.”

A factor contributing to the lower divorce rate of college-educated women is that higher education levels provide more stability and a more secure life, according to Kurz.

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