Age At First Marriage And The Marriage Premium

With the rapid development of our society,economic strength has stepped up a new stage,and social progress has entered a new stage.At the same time,it is accompanied by some problems such as unbalanced and inadequate social development,low economic quality and aging population.Among them,marriage is the most widely concerned issue in social demography circles.In recent years,the extension of the average marriage age and the marriage rate are decreasing year by year.However,the divorce rate is increasing year by year.These phenomena have become new challenges for our social and population development.There have been many researches on marriage age and marriage premium in the academic circle.The marriage premium is defined as the difference between an individual’s income before and after marriage.A large number of researches and discussions have been conducted on the first marriage age choice of marriageable groups and the influencing mechanism of marriage premium.However,there are few researches on the relationship between the first marriage age and marriage premium.For individuals who have met the marriageable age in society,from the perspective of economic rational people,the main issues in this paper are which range of first marriage age can make marriage premium reach the highest,and whether there is heterogeneity in marriage premium caused by marriage time between different groups.Based on the data of Chinese General Social Survey 2018(CGSS2018),this paper discusses the relationship between the age of first marriage and marriage premium through descriptive analysis and empirical analysis methods of quantile regression and grouping regression.The overall regression study found that age at first marriage,gender,education,region,household registration,work experience and physical and mental health had significant effects on marriage premium,and showed significant heterogeneity respectively.In the marriageable group and the late marriageable group,the marriage premium has a significant increase trend with the increase of the first marriage age.Then,the heterogeneity analysis of the control variables was carried out respectively.The results showed that,on the whole,the marriage premium of males was greater than that of females,that of the highly educated group was greater than that of the low-educated group,that of the eastern group was greater than that of the central and western group,and that of the rural household registration group was greater than that of the urban household registration group.The marriage premium of the group with rich work experience is greater than that of the group with little work experience.The physical and mental health of the group also has a significant increasing effect on the marriage premium.Based on the research results of different variables,this paper analyzes the influencing mechanism respectively.This paper verifies the three marriage premium hypotheses and the three age at first marriage hypotheses based on previous studies.Most of the research results support the relevant hypotheses,but some of the results are not completely consistent with the hypotheses.The reason is that the previous theories have evolved under different historical backgrounds and social and economic environments.This paper further discusses and studies the status quo of marriageable groups in contemporary Chinese society.Finally,based on the research and in-depth discussion on the influence mechanism of first marriage age and marriage premium,this paper proposes suggestions on the choice of first marriage age for marriageable groups from the perspective of improving marriage premium.First,try to avoid early marriage and use time to improve education and work experience;Second,for marriageable groups with higher education level and better personal quality,marriage can be appropriately postponed,which helps to increase the marriage premium under the current social background.Third,if conditions permit,the marriageable groups of rural household registration and central and western areas should go to the eastern cities with better economic strength to get married.Developing on a better platform can significantly promote the increase of marriage premium.