Resumen de Marriage squeeze and changes in family formation: historical comparative evidence in Spain, France, and United States in the XXth century

Albert Esteve Palós, Anna María Cabré Pla

• The effects of cohort sizes on family formation have been thoroughly studied, following Easterlin's seminal work, which identifies the labor market as the explanatory factor. The present paper proposes a different but converging hypothesis: with universal female marriage, women in shrinking birth-cohorts would marry younger and in greater proportions, that is, the marriage market would be the explanatory factor. This kind of marriage squeeze should have rapid stimulating effects on female nuptiality, contrary to small effects where there is an excess of females. In two earlier works, the authors have developed the mechanisms of adjustment and tested them successfully for 20th Century Spain, predicting from findings a reversal of fertility trends performed by the cohorts born after 1980. Using recent comparable census microdata, through IPUMS-International, the study is extended now to France and United States, where we seek to generalize the proof. These cases differ by their chronologies and by the imbalances of sexes at specific moments, such as post World War II.