Friday, August 21, 2020

GSS data: Never-married men are _not_ wealthier than divorced men

In response to my claim that married people are, on average, wealthier than people in other marital statuses, a commenter on Twitter suggested that this kind of finding ignores the loss of wealth due to divorce, so it is not worth it to get married. The implication is that people who never marry should be wealthier than divorced people. Of course, we would need to adjust for age since wealth tends to grow as one gets older. 

I did this using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Respondents were asked their wealth on a 15 category scale that went from less than $5,000 to more than $15 million. This first model is for men (n = 1,689):



 

Divorced people are the reference category: all other marital statuses are compared with them.  We can see that never-married men do not more have more wealth than divorced men. The sign indicates that the divorced have more wealth, but the relationship is not statistically significant. The only group that is significantly wealthier than divorced men is the married group. 

And for women (n = 1,769)?

Never-married women do not differ significantly from divorced women in wealth. Widowed and separated women are poorer than divorced women. Married women are the only group that are significantly wealthier. 

Bottom line: marriage is a good place to be. 

3 comments:

  1. Some Guy12:21 AM

    Hey, is the "fertility & views on immigration"-analysis still on your to-do list?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:21 AM

    As you well know, correlation does not mean causation. And there is the fact of selection bias. Some people would assume that your analysis implies that marriage has a causal effect for wealth in men. However, we know that women don't like to marry down, nor do they like to marry poor men or men with little promise of future earnings - i.e., "losers". So, maybe there is no statistically significant difference between never married men and divorced men because never married men actually do earn less and have less net worth than other men, and divorce causes married men to lose out financially and drop down to the level of the "losers". How could you address this issue in your analysis - if you even can?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thankss for posting this

    ReplyDelete

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