Matthijs Kalmijn

Men’s career development and marriage timing during a period of rising inequality

Based on data from 1979–1990 NLSY interviews, we investigate the implications of rising economic inequality for young men’s marriage timing. Our approach is to relate marriage formation to the ease or difficulty of the career-entry process and to show that large race/schooling differences in career development lead to substantial variations in marriage timing. We develop measures of current career “maturity” and of long-term labor-market position. Employing discrete-time event-history methods, we show that these variables have a substantial impact on marriage formation for both blacks and whites. Applying our regression results to models based on observed race/schooling patterns of career development, we then estimate cumulative proportions ever married in a difficult versus an easy career-entry process. We find major differences in the pace of marriage formation, depending on the difficulty of the career transition. We also find considerable differences in these marriage timing patterns across race/schooling groups corresponding to the large observed differences in the speed and difficulty of career transitions between and within these groups

Shifting Boundaries: Trends in Religious and Educational Homogamy

I assess whether intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics has increased over the course of the twentieth century and, if it has, whether the declining salience of religious boundaries has been accompanied by a rising importance of educational boundaries in spouse selection. By analyzing a set of national surveys that were conducted between 1955 and 1989 and using a research design that separates the effects of period and duration of marriage, I examine changes over a longer period of time than any previous study has done. Multivariate loglinear analyses show that intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics has increased dramatically since the 1920s, while intermarriage between different educational groups has decreased. Currently, the social boundaries that separate educational groups seem to be stronger than the boundaries that separate Protestants and Catholics. In addition, there is some evidence that interfaith marriages have become increasingly homogamous with respect to education, suggesting that education has replaced religion as afactor in spouse selection.

Assortative Mating by Cultural and Economic Occupational Status

This study examines two micro-level hypotheses about status homogamy: (1) the cultural matching hypothesis (people prefer to marry someone of similar cultural status) and (2) the economic competition hypothesis (people prefer to marry someone of high economic status). Detailed occupations of newlyweds in the 1970 and 1980 censuses are analyzed. Scales of cultural and economic occupational status are developed, and long-linear models of scaled association are used to analyze 70 x 70 occupational marriage tables. It is found that assortative mating by economic status, the economic dimension of status homogamy is more important when people marry late, and economic stats homogamy has increased between 1970 and 1980 at the expense of cultural status homogamy.

Assortative Meeting and Mating: Unintended Consequences of Organized Settings for Partner Choices

An important hypothesis about why people generally interact with people who are socially or culturally similar to themselves is that the opportunities they have to meet similar others are greater than the opportunities they have to meet dissimilar others. We examine this supply-side perspective on social relationships by empirically linking marriage choices to the type of setting couples had in common before they married. We focus on five meeting settings (work, school, the neighborhood, common family networks, and voluntary associations) and five types of homogamy (with respect to age, education, class destinations, class origins, and religious background). Using data from face-to-face interviews among married and cohabiting couples in the Netherlands, we show that these five contexts account for a sizable portion of the places where partners have met. Using loglinear analyses, we subsequently examine whether couples who shared settings are more homogamous than couples who did not share a setting. Our results indicate that schools promote most forms of homogamy, while work places only promote homogamy with respect to class destinations. Neighborhoods and common family networks promote religious homogamy, but they are not related to homogamy with respect to class origins. While in some cases, settings have unexpected effects on marriage choice, our findings generally confirm the notion that mating requires meeting: the pool of available interaction partners is shaped by various institutionally organized arrangements and these constrain the type of people with whom we form personal relationships.

Race, cultural capital, and schooling: An analysis of trends in the United States

Using survey data on Blacks and Non-Hispanic Whites in 1982 and 1985, the authors examine the link between racial inequality in schooling and differences in cultural capital-the degree to which parents socialize their children into high-status culture. The findings indicate a significant increase in parental cultural capital across birth cohorts (from 1900 to 1960). That this increase has been faster among Blacks than among Whites and persists after Black-White differences are taken into account suggests a degree of racial integration in the cultural domain. The results also show that exposure to high-status culture is associated with higher levels of schooling and that the integration of Blacks into high-status culture has contributed to the Black-White convergence in schooling. The latter finding illustrates that cultural capital may serve as a route to upward mobility for less privileged minority groups.

Explaining cross-national differences in marriage, cohabitation, and divorce in Europe, 1990–2000

European countries differ considerably in their marriage patterns. The study presented in this paper describes these differences for the 1990s and attempts to explain them from a macro-level perspective. We find that different indicators of marriage (i.e., marriage rate, age at marriage, divorce rate, and prevalence of unmarried cohabitation) cannot be seen as indicators of an underlying concept such as the ‘strength of marriage’. Multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses are estimated with countries as units and panel regression models are estimated in which annual time series for multiple countries are pooled. Using these models, we find that popular explanations of trends in the indicators—explanations that focus on gender roles, secularization, unemployment, and educational expansion—are also important for understanding differences among countries. We also find evidence for the role of historical continuity and societal disintegration in understanding cross-national differences.

Shared friendship networks and the life course: an analysis of survey data on married and cohabiting couples

The dyadic withdrawal hypothesis argues that friendship networks become smaller when people enter a cohabiting relationship and that friendship networks become more overlapping with the partner during the course of the relationship. This hypothesis has received fragmented support in earlier research and has not been tested in The Netherlands. A nationally representative data set is analyzed which includes information on the five best friends of the respondent. A special feature of the data is that both partners were interviewed which allows us to check whether the friends reported by the respondent were also reported by the partner. In contrast to earlier studies, a broad set of life course stages is compared: single, dating, married (or cohabiting) without children, married with children, and the empty nest stage. Bivariate results and multilevel regression analyses indicate that friendship networks become smaller over the life course, although these changes primarily occur when people start dating and enter wedlock. Later changes are dominated by a simple age effect. For overlap, the models show that the percentage of shared friends and the number of joint contacts increase over the life course, both in a stepwise fashion and in a continuous fashion due to the aging process. In addition, shared friendship and joint contacts become more strongly related when people start living together. Implications for two underlying theoretical mechanisms are discussed, the competition principle and the balance principle.

The Impact of Young Children on Women's Labour Supply A Reassessment of Institutional Effects in Europe

The proportion of women who withdraw from paid employment when they have children differs considerably among the countries of the European Union (EU), and the variation has mostly been attributed to institutional factors. In this study, we reassess the institutional explanation, because earlier supportive evidence is threatened by two alternative macro-level explanations: the influence of the economic necessity to work and the influence of gender role values in society. Our main research question is whether and to what extent these alternative explanations alter the effect of public childcare arrangements on mothers’ labour supply. Using panel data from 13 countries of the EU, we find evidence in favour of the institutional and economic explanations. In countries with more generous provision of public childcare and in countries with a lower level of economic welfare, the impact of childbirth on female labour supply is less negative than in other countries. Economic welfare appears to suppress rather than rival the institutional effect. More egalitarian gender role values in a country increase mothers’ labour supply, yet these values do not alter the institutional effect. Our results underpin the importance of publicly supported arrangements for enhancing female labour supply.

A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON INTERGENERATIONAL SUPPORT

ABSTRACT It has often been argued that Southern European countries are more familialistic in their culture than Western and Northern European countries. In this paper, we examine this notion by testing the hypothesis that adult children are more responsive to the needs of their elderly parents in countries with more familialistic attitudes. To test this hypothesis, we analyse the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We focus on three indicators of need: (a) the partner status of the parent, (b) the health status of the parent, and (c) the education of the parent. Using Heckman probit models, we examine the effects of these variables on whether or not the parent receives instrumental support from children, thereby controlling for whether or not children live independently from their parents. We estimate effects of need on support and we compare these effects across 10 European countries, using both graphic devices and a multilevel probit model where individuals are nested in countries. We find significant cross-level interactions of need variables and the degree of familialism in a country. Our analyses, thereby provide more positive evidence for the hypothesis than earlier studies, which have focused largely on comparing aggregate levels of support among countries.

Income dynamics in couples and the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation

Several studies have shown that a wife’s strong (socio)economic position is associated with an increase in the risk of divorce. Less is known about such effects for cohabiting relationships. Using a unique and large-scale sample of administrative records from The Netherlands, we analyze the link between couples’ income dynamics and union dissolution for married and cohabiting unions over a 10-year period. We find negative effects of household income on separation and positive effects of the woman’s relative income, in line with earlier studies. The shape of the effect of the woman’s relative income, however, depends on the type of union. Movements away from income equality toward a maledominant pattern tend to increase the dissolution risk for cohabiting couples, whereas they reduce the dissolution risk for married couples. Movements away from income equality toward a female-dominant pattern (reverse specialization) increase the dissolution risks for both marriage and cohabitation. The findings suggest that equality is more protective for cohabitation, whereas specialization is more protective for marriage, although only when it fits a traditional pattern. Finally, we find that the stabilizing effects of income equality are more pronounced early in the marriage and that income equality also reduces the dissolution risk for same-sex couples.