Should marriage be traditional to make people's lives better?

What is it about?

This paper uses broad survey data to answer two questions. First, we know that today people marry later and divorce more than they did in past decades. Does this mean that marriage does not make people as happy as it did in the past? Second, the Nobel prize winner Gary Becker postulated that benefits of marriage depend on gender specialization, i.e. situation when men earn and women care. This suggests that the declining gender specialization may be the cause of decreasing benefits of marriages. This paper shows that the relationship between marriage and subjective well-being indeed became weaker over last 30 years. However, the declining gender specialization does not explain this change. The results also suggest that marriages make people happiest in the conditions of free choice and not economic necessity.

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Why is it important?

Some people, among them policy makers, believe that the traditional marriage is the universal recipe for happiness: it makes better off women, men, and children. This may encourage policies to strengthen traditional gender roles, such as joint taxation for couples or childcare leaves for mothers but not for fathers. This paper shows that traditional gender roles and economic dependence between spouses do not make married people happier, and gender equality does not make married people less happy.