Trends in Educational Differentials in Marriage Formation among Taiwanese Women
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Chang, Yi-Chuan
Abstract
In this thesis, I address the debate over whether or not women are retreating from marriage as their economic potential improves. The empirical analyses focus on distinguishing between marriage delayed and marriage forgone. I use data pooled from 15 waves of the Women’s Marriage, Fertility, and Employment Surveys (WMFES) conducted between 1979 and 2006 to document cohort trends in marriage formation. I apply Cox proportional hazard regressions to analyze rates for marriage delayed and the Kaplan-Meier estimates of eventual probabilities for marriage forgone. I further examine the role of education as a proxy for women’s earnings potential in driving the documented trends in marriage formation. Earnings potentials are calculated using data pooled from the 1976-2006 waves of the Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (SFIE), and included in discrete-time hazard models to analyze the WMFES data. The results show that more highly educated Taiwanese women marry later and fewer than less educated women. The observed educational differentials in marriage formation among Taiwanese women cannot be fully attributed to the differences in human capital investment. These results suggest that there are non-economic mechanisms behind the educational differentials in Taiwanese women’s marriage formation. Hence my findings support neither Becker’s nor Oppenheimer’s theory about marriage formation.
Subjects
marriage formation
educational differentials
even history analysis
women’s economic independence hypothesis, and career entry hypothesis
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