Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effects Of Cohort Size On Marriage Markets In Twentieth Century Sweden, Ted Bergstrom, David Lam

Ted C Bergstrom

Large, short-run fluctuations in the birth rate have been an important demographic feature of industrialized, low-fertility populations in the twentieth century. Since females normally marry men who are two or three years older than themselves, these fluctuations result in large imbalances between the size of male and female cohorts who would normally marry each other. These imbalances must somehow be resolved, either by a change in traditional patterns of age at marriage or by changes in the proportions of the population of one sex or the other who ever marry.

Following a suggestion of Becker (1974,1981), we have developed a …