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Check out what happened to marriage rates after the wall fell in east Germany. Ever seen anything that dramatic?? The economist who shared this is from west Germany and told me she thinks it was caused partly by disruption in housing markets.pic.twitter.com/R9xectrg2w
Apparently, housing allocations had been made partly based on preferential criteria for married couples, and so when that disappeared, the incentive to marry did as well. She and I spent a long time doodling causal graphs to think about whether that could be tested.
But more generally, i can’t get this picture out of my head. She made it sound like the wall fell, but there wasn’t substantial out and in migration. So if that’s somewhat true, the actual number of marriage market participants stayed basically fixed.
They just preferred delaying marriage or no marriage. Which I can believe but what amazes me is how quickly those preferences would’ve changed and it also implies the housing market had been forcing relationships that were not optimal. So many questions!
Perhaps people were married on paper to get a house, then reverted to the reality when they didn’t have to fake it?
That was the interpretation this economist suggested to me
Do you have a link to the paper? Thanks!
No, she was mainly sharing with me her intuition, or hypothesis.
Wait, what's going on here? Marriage and divorce rates fell at the same time? So those who were married already stayed together but younger people chose to remain single?
She actually never showed me this divorce graph, so finding this graph overlaid with marriage was the first I’d seen it. I don’t know how this selection is occurring.
The divorce rate in East Germany seems to have picked up again during the 90s again (temporal economic uncertainty) but remains constantly below the rate in the West (while it was higher before the reunification). Interesting pattern indeed. http://www.sozialpolitik-aktuell.de/tl_files/sozialpolitik-aktuell/_Politikfelder/Bevoelkerung/Datensammlung/PDF-Dateien/abbVII15.pdf …pic.twitter.com/8KuPmBls5E
Just love his jacket!
Demographer's rule of thumb: if you see a 50-80% change in marriage or divorce over two years, the most likely explanation is a change in the quality of the source data. Not saying that's definitely the case here, but, well, Occam's razor. HT @SophieMoullin
Lifecourse uncertainty more broadly played into this as well. Fertility decline in E Germany but throughout E Europe after the fall of the wall is absolutely staggering.
Many of these places were in anarchy. Russia was on verge of self imploding
Better if solid lines represented marriage and/or divorce and dotted lines the opposite. This graph confusing.
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