Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

Marriage rate has been decreased continuously for past five decades in the U.S. (Ruggles et al. 2014). One of the most important factors to explain this downward trend is increasing income inequality at individual levels (Cherlin, 2014, Gould and Paserman, 2003, Burtless, 1999, Oppenheimer et al., 1997). Overall economic inequality including income inequality is also expected to affect marriage rate negatively. Based on economic decision models on marriage decision (Becker, 1973, 1974, 1977), this study investigates and verifies the negative relationship between economic inequality and marriage rate in the U.S with vector autoregressive model by analysing macroeconomic time-series data. Governmental efforts to ease economic inequality will help to reduce or even reverse declining trend in marriage rate.