TITLE:
Fecundity and Husband-Wife Age Gap at First Marriage—Cross-Country Analysis
AUTHORS:
Xu Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Age Gap at First Marriage, Fecundity, World Marriage Pattern 2000
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.4 No.7,
August
14,
2014
ABSTRACT: One explanation given
for the gender wage gap is the division of labor in the home. On the marriage
outset, averagely speaking, husbands who are older invest more human capital in
market activities than wives. This paper concentrates on the age gap at first
marriage. It hypothesizes that the demand for children is one important reason
for the husband-wife age gap. To show this, the paper extends a two-sided
matching model of marriage (originally introduced by Eugenio Giolito [1]) based on the
biological fact that men have a longer fecundity horizon than women and examines
cross-country data from World Marriage Patterns 2000 to show a higher marital
age gap the greater the role children play in economic activities, the greater
the importance of agriculture in an economy, the greater a country’s rural
compared to total population, and the greater the population’s proportion of
pro-natal religions.