Abstract

Although research on the protective effect of marriage for health has yielded vast empirical evidence, the dynamics of this effect is not always clearly conceptualized. Moreover, the previous literature is dominated by U.S. studies, which calls for analyzing other social contexts. This paper contributes to the field by explicitly distinguishing between an instant vs. cumulative effect of marriage on health, as well as between a short- vs. long-term effect of the transition into first marriage. We analyze mental and physical health, self-rated health, and health satisfaction. We extend the existing empirical evidence to German panel data, and focus on long-term health trajectories. We used German SOEP data covering the period 1984-2015 and fixed effects regression for panel data to model the dynamics of the effects of marriage on health, separately for men and women. Our results showed that the transition to marriage correlated with a temporary improvement of health. However, we found no cumulative protective effect of first marriage on health in the general population. Health improves with the duration of marriage only in some subgroups, in particular in younger cohorts and among people who married at older ages. In contrast to most previous studies, our analysis explicitly models various types of dynamics in the protective effect of marriage on health. Our results suggest that the protective effects of marriage for health are generally overstated.