Getting Married in the Great Recession: Local Contexts and Marriage Formation among U.S. Young Adults

• In Event: 475 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Transition to Adulthood during Hard Times

Abstract

How has the Great Recession shaped the transition to first marriage among young adults in the United States? In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, in conjunction with the American Community Survey and other data sources, to begin to assess the impact of the recession on young adults’ marriage formation behavior, focusing on the importance of local economic conditions and the supply of economically attractive partners and how these might differ for men and women. Preliminary results indicate that (1) there was a measurable decline in marriage during the period following the recession among young adult men and women, and (2) consistent with research on previous marriage cohorts, local labor and marriage market conditions continue to be consequential for contemporary young adults’ marriage behavior. However, recession-era period effects do not appear to be accounted for by these local conditions. This article also provides a much-needed update to the marriage-market literature in the US with a nationally representative sample of young adults and finds important differences in the effects of the local sex composition on marriage formation between single and cohabiting men and women.

Author

• David Michael McClendon, University of Texas-Austin