Do moving and making big decisions tend to happen together?
We use exogenously determined, long-distance relocations of U.S. Army soldiers to investigate the impact of moving on marriage. We find that marriage rates increase sharply around the time of a move in an event study analysis. Reduced form exposure analysis reveals that an additional move over a five year period increases the likelihood of marriage by 14 percent. Moves increase childbearing by a similar magnitude, suggesting that marriages induced by a move are formed with long-term intentions. These findings are consistent with a model where the marriage decision is costly and relocation lowers the costs to making this decision. Our results have implications for understanding how people make major life decisions such as marriage, as well as the cost of migration.
That is from a new paper by Susan Payne Carter and Abigail Wozniak. It’s as if the move jolts you out of complacency and activates your long-term planning modules. Here are some bits from the paper, as assembled by an MR reader:
– …marriage rates rise sharply shortly before and in the first two months after a move.– Additional moves encourage marriage, raising the likelihood of marriage and of having children present as dependents.– The likelihood of marrying prior to five years of Army service rises by 8 percentage points with an additional domestic move, representing an increase of 14 percent from the mean marriage rate.– We first considered a model in which relocation likely requires investment in thinking about long-term plans that may simultaneously lower the cost of considering other types of long-term commitments, like marriage.– This suggests that the decision to marry may be affected by other events requiring long-term planning. This in turn implies that a disruptive event, like a relocation, may actually strengthen family ties rather than strain them.
For the pointers I thank two MR readers.