The Big 5 Personality Traits and Valentine's Advice

This post from the myPersonality Research blog presents results showing that traditional and conscientious people are more likely to be married. The blog-post discusses how it is possible that marriage might somehow cause people to change their personality to be more traditional and conscientious, rather than traditional and conscientious people getting and staying married. However, they still offer the following Valentine's advice: "to show that you’re marriage material ... we suggest that men should... ask their Valentine out with 40 traditional red roses, and arrive on time to take her to a nice conventional romantic dinner."

Is love in the air?

Love is in the air everywhere I look around. Love is in the air, every sight and every sound. And I don't know if I'm being foolish, don't know if I'm being wise but it's something that I must believe in and it's there when I look in your eye. Well not really but according to a recent article in an Irish newspaper (which I have mislaid) there is a boom in the number of couples marrying, despite or perhaps because of the recession.
On the hand marriages cost money so we would expect a fall but according to Oswald & Clark, the utility of marriage is worth a lot in monetary terms (about £70k per annum, in 2001 prices) so one might expect people to substitute into marriage since cash is hard to come by these days.
So whats the evidence for Ireland? I plot about 20 years of data on annual marriage and unemployment rates (which I extracted with some difficulty from the CSO web site). While its hard to infer much it seems that largely marriage rates fall as unemployment rises though it may rise at the high rates we currently observe.

The economist as marriage guidance counsellor

Is there anything that economists can't (or perhaps won't) turn their hands to? Apparently not if Spousonomics: using economics to master love, marriage and dirty dishes by P. Szuchman & J. Anderson is anything to go by.
Naturally, you can come to me with your relationship problems too. For a modest fee, that is, but mainly for a heartless laugh.

For better or for worse, but how about a recession?

Pretty much everyone is feeling the pain of the recession, unless you specialize in bankruptcy I suppose. How could it get worse? Well if you marriage ended due to the recession that would be a real bummer. So whats the story Rory? Well it looks like years 6-10 of your marriage is when you need to watch out, after the first flush of marital bliss and before she's just resigned to you.

For Better or for Worse, But How About a Recession?
J Arkes, Y-C Shen
In light of the current economic crisis, we estimate hazard models of divorce to determine how state and national unemployment rates affect the likelihood of divorce. With 89,340 observations over the 1978-2006 period for 7633 couples from the 1979 NLSY, we find mixed evidence on whether increases in the unemployment rate lead to overall increases in the likelihood of divorce, which would suggest countercyclical divorce probabilities. However, further analysis reveals that the weak evidence is due to the weak economy increasing the risk of divorce only for couples in years 6 to 10 of marriage. For couples in years 1 to 5 and couples married longer than 10 years, there is no evidence of a pattern between the strength of the economy and divorce probabilities. The estimates are generally stronger in magnitude when using national instead of state unemployment rates.

Can you be happier than your wife?

Externalities abound in the real world and those within the household are some of the most salient. Perhaps the most salient occurs with regard to happiness, its hard to be happy if a loved one is not. So "you can't be happier than your wife". Unless you're a thoughtless git, that is. And if a big gap exists between the happiness of a couple, perhaps this leads to stress and ultimately a split. It can't help. The paper below looks at this and finds that, indeed, bigger gaps in happiness are predictive of divorce.
An important issue here is the granularity of measurement. If you measure happiness or life satisfaction on, say, a 20 point scale then you are less likely a couple on the same levels of measured happiness than if its a 10 point scale.
Intruiged by all this, I looked at life satisfaction in the SHARE data. It has a 4 point scale of life satisfaction (very satisfied,somewhat satisfied,somewhat dissatisfied,very dissatisfied). About 60% of individuals report the same level as their partner.
I didn't find any obvious predictors of this gap. Women are less likely to be more satisfied than their partners but largely because they report lower satisfaction in general.

You can't be happer than your wife:happiness gaps and divorce
C. Guven, C.Senik, H.Stichnoth
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4599.pdf

Some lurve advice from Dr Kev

Doubtless many people would like me to advise them on their love life but are too shy, why else has it never happened after all? So what are the secrets of a happy relationship? One common axiom is that "opposites attract". Well even if they do, are you better off being different from your partner?
Below I graph subjective happiness against the difference in the education of oneself and ones partner - so high values mean is more educated than ones partner.Data is ESS for Ireland & UK.
As you can clearly see there is a downward sloping trend. So if you are more educated than you're loved one one you will regret it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

On a theorem of Barry Manilow

Many years ago my doctoral supervisor remarked (I have no idea why) "You can't be happier than your wife". I subsequently repeated this remark to a feminist colleague in UCD who was less than amused. Anyway I often wondered about testing this idea. Now its been done:

I can’t smile without you: Spousal correlation in life satisfaction

Nattavudh Powdthavee

This paper tests whether one partner’s happiness significantly influences the happiness of the other partner. Using 10 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, it utilizes a panel-based GMM methodology to estimate a dynamic model of life satisfaction. The use of the GMM-system estimator corrects for correlated effects of partner’s life satisfaction and solves the problem of measurement error bias. The results show that, for both genders, there is a positive and statistically significant spillover effect of life satisfaction that runs from one partner to the other partner in a couple. The positive bias on the estimated spillover effect coming from assortative mating and shared social environment at cross-section is almost offset by the negative bias coming from systematic measurement errors in the way people report their life satisfaction. Moreover, consistent with the spillover effect model, couple dissolution at t + 1 is negatively correlated with partners’ life satisfaction at t.

Journal of Economic Psychology 30 (4), August 2009, 675-689