Postponement or Abandonment of Marriage? Evidence from Hong Kong
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines whether the rise in the age at first marriage among women observed across many countries in the post-war era reflects postponement or abandonment of marriage. On both theoretical and empirical grounds, we reject the oft-cited Economic Independence hypothesis, which argues that rising educational attainment and employment among women have weakened the rationale for marriage, leading more women to forego marriage. Instead, using a human capital approach, we argue that rising educational and economic opportunity would lead women to postpone, but not abandon, marriage in order to complete more human capital investment early in the life course. Empirical analysis applied to an original data set for Hong Kong women broadly supports our hypothesis. Specifically, the use of hazard analysis shows that educational and career attainment among women in our sample reduce their marriage rates, but this effect tends to diminish over the life course. This result is further supported by applying survey analysis on the same sample. Specifically, women with higher educational attainment and career attainment actually expressed a stronger desire for marriage, albeit at a late age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".