Title not available in English.

Abstract

The marriage squeeze and the rise in informal marriage in Brazil. Throughout the world, populations experience shortage of one sex or the other in the age group in which people generally marry, usually as a result of a decline in mortality. The solutions to this problem vary with the cultural context: reduction in the age difference between husband and wife, increase in the value of dowries, and polygamy are three ways of reestablishing an equilibrium in the marriage market. Our hypothesis is that in Brazil the marriage market is balanced by the "recycling” of men through instable consensual union. With censun data from the last forty years and the PNAD of 1984, we show the link between the marriage squeeze and the increase in the number of informal marriage. A competing risks analysis of the chance of remaining single versus entering a formal marriage or consensual union provides evidence that the marriage squeeze has affected both the possibility of entering any type of union and the type of marriage entered.