Who Can Afford to Marry? The Economic Barrier to Marriage Among Couples with Children in the UK

Andrea Tartakowsky , University of Bristol
Susan Harkness, University of Bristol

Over the past few decades, the proportion of married families with children has decreased in the UK while the percentage of cohabiting families and lone mothers has increased significantly. Cohabitees have no legal obligations to one another if their relationship ends, and no automatic entitlement to property. Therefore, children of cohabiting couples are in a position of higher vulnerability compared with their counterparts who live with married parents, especially if their unmarried parents separate. Recent research conducted using US data has suggested that one of the reasons why low-income couples do not get married is because they have not met the “economic bar to marriage”. This paper aims to understand whether there is such an economic barrier to marriage in the UK, what its components are, and to what extent it influences the timing of first marriage among cohabiting couples with children. Using data from the British Household Panel Study (1990-2008) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2020), we examine the association between couple’s earnings, employment stability and home ownership and the timing of first marriage in the UK over the last three decades. Using Cox proportional hazard models, our preliminary results suggest that home ownership, as well as male employment stability and earnings growth, seem to be significant pre-conditions for couples with children to transit from cohabiting to marriage. However, contrary to results reported for the US, we do not observe a significant association between maternal earnings and labour market participation with the timing to enter into marriage.

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 Presented in Session 50. Union formation