Where the marriages are

A wonderfully interesting study, How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage by David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy. The study is big, robust, complex, and puzzling. The best kind of thing to get your cognitive teeth into. The links in the article are worth following for additional layers of complexity and detail.

The place where you grow up doesn’t affect only your future income, as we wrote about last week. It also affects your odds of marrying, a large new data set shows.

The most striking geographical pattern on marriage, as with so many other issues today, is the partisan divide. Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America — especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington — makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country. And no place encourages marriage quite like the conservative Mountain West, especially the heavily Mormon areas of Utah, southern Idaho and parts of Colorado.

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One caveat: All of these statistics analyze a child’s odds of being married by age 26. We asked the researchers, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, whether the differences in marriage may be much smaller than these comparisons suggest. That is, does a childhood make marriage less likely — or simply delay marriage?

It does not seem to simply delay marriage; the researchers found very similar patterns when they looked at the data up to age 30. The places that made marriage more likely at 26 also tended to make it more likely at age 30. The children in the study aren’t yet old enough for conclusions beyond age 30. But the best guess for now is that these differences aren’t only about timing. Children who grow in New York, among other places, appear less likely to be married by 26, less likely to be married by 30 and probably less likely to marry at any point.

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One of the most striking relationships we found in the data was between political ideology and the marriage effect: The more strongly a county voted Republican in the 2012 election, the more that growing up there generally encourages marriage.

And it’s not simply about rural areas leaning Republican and promoting marriage — although both are true. The few metropolitan counties that voted Republican in 2012 turn out to be in marriage-encouraging places, such as Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Fort Worth, as well as Waukesha County, Wis., just west of Milwaukee.

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The Deep South presents the most complex picture. It nudges affluent children toward marriage and lower-income children away from it. By comparison, the Northeast generally discourages marriage for children of all income levels, and the Mountain West encourages it for children of all levels.

Race certainly plays a role here. Lower-income children in the South are disproportionately black, and marriage rates are also lower among African-Americans. But the data suggests that race is not the only factor: When poor families move to the South, their children become less likely to marry, and there is no evidence that the effect is restricted to only one race.

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Politics isn’t the only dividing line on marriage. Less densely populated places also seem to promote marriage, even after taking an area’s political leanings into account.

The only two states that both make marriage significantly more likely and that voted Democratic in 2012 are Iowa and Oregon. Those two states have a much lower population density than California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and most other blue states. That’s a sign that rural areas and small towns encourage marriage more than cities.

Fascinating.