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“Your Place, My Place or yet Another?” Assortative Mating and the Place of a Couple’s First Joint Household

Christine Schnor, UCLouvain
Clara H. Mulder, University of Groningen

This study links the characteristics of newly-formed couples to their location choice and investigates the specific role of assortative mating with regard to education, age, family structure and local ties (living at birth place, homeownership) in the process of household formation. We perceive location choice as a bargaining process and education, gender, age, local ties and children as assets of bargaining power. Integral micro data from Belgian population census and register enables us to study household formation among all new cohabiters in the period 2001-2006. Results show support for the bargaining hypothesis in heterogamous couples, but location choice is not influenced by gender. More educated couples are indeed more likely to move to a new location. The findings suggest that especially age and children indeed increase bargaining power in location choice. Next, we will include more information (distance to non-resident family members, occupation, place of work, recent separation) and investigate in greater detail the group of couples who chose a new place.

Keywords: Internal migration, Census data, Life course analysis, Family demography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P15.