Active-duty military service in the United States: Cohabiting unions and the transition to marriage

Abstract A small but growing body of research has begun to identify the consequences of military service during the all-voluntary era. Previous literature has emphasized the role played by the economic prospects of men in stimulating marriage, among both singles and cohabiters. Military service and marriage are related through pay rates, stability of employment and additional benefits awarded to married couples. In this article, we examine the relationship between military service and the likelihood that cohabiting unions will be converted into marriages. Our paper extends previous research by making a distinction between the effects of active-duty verses reserve-duty service on the transition to marriage using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Our findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between active-duty service and cohabitors transitioning to marriage. 1. Introduction A small but growing body of research has begun to identify the consequences of military service during the all-voluntary era, including socioeconomic attainment (Angrist 1990; Teachman 2003), marriage (Lundquist 2004, Teachman 2007), and divorce (Lundquist 2006). In this article, we extend this research by examining the relationship between military service and the likelihood that cohabiting unions will be converted into marriages. Using data taken from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79), we show that active-duty military service is positively associated with the likelihood that a cohabiting union will end in marriage. This finding holds in the face of numerous controls for important covariates known to be associated with marriage, as well as important controls for selectivity into military service. 2. Previous research Over the last several decades, premarital cohabitation has become increasingly common. Currently, almost 50 percent of couples cohabit before marriage and during the 1980s (our time period of study) cohabitation rates fluctuated between 30-40 % depending upon age (Bumpass and Lu 2000, Thorton 1988). This prevalence has prompted many researchers to seek factors related to the transition to marriage among cohabitors. For the most part, this body of literature suggests that better socioeconomic attainment (education, occupation, or earnings) for cohabiting men spurs marriage (Brown 2000, Lichter, Qian, and Mellott 2006, Oppenheimer 2003, Sanchez, Manning and Smock 1998, Smock and Manning 1997, Smock et al 2005), while the socioeconomic attainments of cohabiting women are not related to marriage (Brown 2000, Sanchez, Manning, and Smock 1998, Smock and Manning 1997). Despite the growing body of literature examining the transition from cohabitation to marriage, prior research has ignored the relationship between military service and union transitions among cohabitors. This relationship is important to study given the prevalence of military service among men. Pettit and Western (2004; see also the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense 2005) estimate that 17 % of black men and 14% of white men born 1965-1969 have served in the military. If men experiencing incarceration are excluded, nearly one in four black men of this generation has served in the military. Thus, military service is not an anomaly or an isolated event in the transition to adulthood, even during the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) era; it is a common event that occurs at ages during which many men are forming intimate relationships. Military service represents an important source of employment and job training (Mangum and Ball 1987, Phillips et al. 1992), and because this is a form of socioeconomic attainment, military service may influence the decisions men make about marriage and cohabitation. Just as military service inherently affects marriage, it is also related to outcomes such as divorce. Men serving in all branches of the military face higher risks of divorce than their civilian counterparts because they tend to marry at a younger age and are exposed to job related stresses such as relocations, long separations from their spouse during deployment, long work hours, and high mental/physical risks (Adler-Baeder, Pittman, and Taylor 2005). …