Many contemporary studies find that married couples are more satisfied with life than unmarried people. However, whether marriage makes people more satisfied with life or whether more satisfied couples are more likely to marry remains a debated question. We reassess this relationship with panel data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) and extend previous analyses by adding individual trajectories (slopes) to standard fixed-effects regressions (FEIS). We are thereby able to distinguish – controlling for time-constant unobserved heterogeneity – whether there is in fact an effect of marriage on life satisfaction, whether people who are simply happier in their relationship are more likely to get married, or whether people whose development in life satisfaction is more positive are more likely to get married. We translate these different social mechanisms into different analytical strategies and find that OLS regression – due to its confounding effects between and within persons – overestimates the effect of marriage on life satisfaction. A fixed-effects estimator reveals a much lower effect of marriage on life satisfaction for couples who marry compared to those who continue to live apart together or cohabitate. Additionally, using a FEIS estimator and adjusting for – non-linear – development of individual life satisfaction over time, suggests that this effect is in fact causal. * This article belongs to a special issue on "Identification of causal mechanisms in demographic research: The contribution of panel data".

中文翻译：

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婚姻能增加夫妻生活满意度吗？

许多当代研究发现，已婚夫妇比未婚者对生活更满意。然而，婚姻是否使人们对生活更满意，或者更满意的夫妻是否更有可能结婚，仍然是一个有争议的问题。我们使用来自德国家庭小组 (pairfam) 的小组数据重新评估这种关系，并通过将单个轨迹 (斜率) 添加到标准固定效应回归 (FEIS) 来扩展先前的分析。因此，我们能够区分——控制时间常数、未观察到的异质性——婚姻是否真的对生活满意度有影响，在他们的关系中更快乐的人是否更有可能结婚，或者在生活满意度越积极越容易结婚。我们将这些不同的社会机制转化为不同的分析策略，并发现 OLS 回归——由于其在人与人之间和内部的混杂效应——高估了婚姻对生活满意度的影响。固定效应估计显示，与继续分居或同居的夫妻相比，结婚对夫妻生活满意度的影响要低得多。此外，使用 FEIS 估计器并随着时间的推移调整个人生活满意度的非线性发展，表明这种影响实际上是因果关系。* 本文属于“人口研究中的因果机制识别：面板数据的贡献”特刊。