Title: Understanding the Evolution of Labor and Marriage Markets from 1968 to 2018

Speaker: Shi Zejin, Assistant Professor of the School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University; Doctor of Economics from the University of Arizona, USA. His research fields are labor economics, macroeconomics, and computational economics, focusing on studying the life-cycle decisions of education, marriage, and labor markets using structural models and general equilibrium analysis frameworks.

Abstract: This paper investigates how socioeconomic changes and divorce law reforms in the United States from 1968 to 2018 affected labor and marriage market outcomes. We construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model incorporating educational choices, marriage decisions, and female labor supply, analyzing the impacts of changes in marital social norms, rising college premiums, narrowing gender wage gaps, increased wage volatility, and the shift in divorce laws from mutual consent to unilateral divorce. The model endogenizes both labor and marriage markets and depicts the rich interactions between the two markets along the transition path. To fully leverage the dynamic characteristics of time series and the differences in divorce law reforms across states, we propose an innovative methodology of "connected equilibrium transitional paths" to estimate the model by fitting connected equilibrium transition paths, thereby separating the effects of various exogenous drivers. The research finds that the rising college premium has driven the improvement of educational levels for both genders and is also an important factor in the delay of marriage in recent years; the decline in marital social norms is the primary driver of delayed marriage and increased divorce risk; divorce law reforms only triggered a short-term jump in the divorce rate, with limited long-term effects. The analysis reveals a fundamental shift in the motivation for educational decisions among young generations from the marriage market to the labor market.

Datw & time: 20 March 2026, 14:00 - 16:00Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University

Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University