Peer Effects and Marriage Formation

Abstract

We use almost two decades of administrative data on U.S. Army soldiers to explore the impact of peers on marriage decisions. Leveraging conditional random assignment to peer groups and substantial identifying variation in peer group marriage rates, we find a positive and statistically significant causal impact of peer marriage rates on the likelihood of marriage within two years of assignment. The effect of peers is larger for Black and Hispanic men, and is notably more persistent for Black men. We benchmark our estimates against previous research and argue that the effect of peers on individual marriage decisions is economically meaningful.