Age Assortative Mating and Union Dissolution in Italy

Daniela Bellani, Scuola Normale Superiore
Antonella Guarneri , Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Francesca Rinesi, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

As in other Western countries, in Italy, during the last decades, family change has been characterized, among other factors, by increasing divorce rates. Several contributions have analyzed potential determinants of such increase. In this study, we focus for the first time for the Italian context on age assortative mating patterns (who ‘marries’ whom in terms of age). In particular, we analyze whether there is an association between relative age of spouses and union dissolution and whether the stability premium related to age assortative mating patterns has changed/has reversed during the last decades. We employ data of the survey “Families and social subjects (FSS)”, collected by National Institute of Statistics (Istat) in 2016. FFS provides micro-level retrospective information on union histories. To answer our research question we focused on first-marriage and we selected a sub-sample of 13,459 individuals (157,114 spells) that got married for the first time between 1970 and 1999. Models are estimated using logistic regression to fit the binary response model. Generally speaking, we found hypergamous couples to have a lower risk of separation. This result seems to confirm the perspective of marriage as a gendered institution that favors hypergamy. However, adopting a dynamic approach, a statistically significant stability premium for hypergamy couples does not appear in the more recent first marriage cohort we considered. We convey that the stability premium associated with hypergamy has declined. Thus, it seems that the severity of the non-normative power relations represented by hypogamous arrangement does not represent a factor of instability anymore.

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 Presented in Session 43. Homogamy and intermarriage