Financial Times - June 3, 2002
THE AMERICAS & INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY: Women in US waiting longer for Mr Rich By David Turner, Economics Staff, in London
Women are responding to the increasing disparity in male earnings by delaying marriage while they seek a wealthy husband, according to a research paper* looking at the US marriage market.
But this intensely practical approach towards wedded bliss is also a high-risk strategy, since it is leaving more women unmarried.
The paper, written by Eric Gould and Marco Daniele Paserman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, suggests that the greater the inequality of male wages in their city, the longer white US women spend searching for a husband.
In cold, rational terms, women have a greater incentive to hold out because the rewards for doing so, in terms of money and attendant status, are relatively high. Or, as the paper puts it more bluntly, "all mature women are waiting longer to get married when faced with a higher variance of potential husband quality".
This behaviour accounts for about 30 per cent of the decline of the US marriage rate in recent decades, say the authors.
According to the 1990 US Census, 19 per cent of 30-year-old white women had never married - about double the proportion two decades before.
Social analysts think that the proportion has risen still further over the past decade.
The paper's conclusions are the same regardless of age, education and whether women are looking for their first or second husband. They suggest that women's increasing capacity to earn a good wage has not removed the desire to raise their standard of living and status still more by finding a high-earning male.
The authors suggest their findings reveal yet further unpleasant consequences of wage inequality.
Greater numbers of single men and women may mean an increase in crime and even chip away at the foundations of capitalism by lowering incentives to work hard. The paper has implications for other developed countries where wage inequality has risen in recent decades.
* Waiting for Mr Right: rising inequality and declining marriage rates, Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper No. 3388, May 2002. Eric D Gould, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and CEPR, M Daniele Paserman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem