Estimating the Effects of Marriage Timing on Educational Attainment: Some Procedural Issues and Substantive Clarifications

The importance of marriage timing for educational attainment is examined for a national sample of young men and women. In attempting to deal with technical deficiencies in earlier research on this issue, we distinguish schooling obtained prior to marrying from that obtained afterward and adjust both measures for the age-grading of school enrollment patterns. We focus on the implications of marriage timing for schooling obtained after one marries. We conclude that marrying early is detrimental to the educational attainments of women but of little or no consequence for men. We also demonstrate that formulations of the age at marriage-educational attainment relationship similar to those employed in other studies would have led to quite different conclusions.