Marital Status and Mortality: The Role of Health
Citation: Lillard, Lee A., Panis, Constantijn W. A. (1996) Marital Status and Mortality: The Role of Health. Demography (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Marital Status and Mortality: The Role of Health
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)
Summary
Prior literature has shown that married men live longer than unmarried men. Possible explanations are that marriage protects its incumbents or that healthier men select themselves into marriage. Protective effects, however, introduce the possibility of adverse selection: those in poor health have an incentive to marry. In this paper, Lillard and Panis use data on men from the PSID from 1984 to 1990 to explore the role of health in explaining mortality and marriage patterns, and distinguish protective effects from 2 types of selection effects. They find that when health (self-reported health this is the measure used for health throughout this paper) is controlled, divorced men do not experience significantly higher mortality risks than married men; health appears to be the intervening variable that explains most of the observed difference in mortality risk between married and divorced men. This finding does not apply to never-married and widowed men; their excess mortality must be due to something other than health as measured in the PSID. They also find that health status affects transitions in marital status. For example, healthier men are less likely to remarry. In a simultaneous model of marital status, health, and mortality, Lillard and Panis actually find that healthier men are less likely to marry; that is, health men marry later and postpone remarriage. Relatively unhealthy men tend to (re)marry early; thus there is adverse selection into marriage on the basis on health. In particular, adverse selection with regard to general health dominates for divorced men over age 50. At the same time, the authors find positive selection on the basis of unmeasured factors: a significant and positive correlation exists, induced by unmeasured factors that affect both health and the hazard of marrying. In other words, unmeasured factors that promoted good health also tend to encourage marriage, and unmeasured factors that harm health also tend to discourage marriage. According to Lillard and Panis, this strong positive correlation in unmeasured factors implies that men who marry early tend to be healthier than men who remain unmarried, conditional on the measured factors that affect general health; this point in turn implies positive selection into marriage.
