IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/easeco/v42y2016i3p317-334.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Are Pornography and Marriage Substitutes for Young Men?

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Malcolm

    (Department of Economics, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, 700 South High Street, West Chester, PA 19383, USA.)

  • George Naufal

    (Timberlake Consultants Limited, B3 Broomsleigh Business Park, Worsley Bridge Road, London SE26 5BN, UK.
    Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, D-53113 Bonn, Germany)

Abstract

Substitutes for marital sexual gratification may impact the decision to marry. Proliferation of the Internet has made pornography an increasingly low-cost substitute. We investigate the effect of Internet usage, and of pornography consumption specifically, on the marital status of young men. We show that increased Internet usage is negatively associated with marriage formation. Pornography consumption specifically has an even stronger effect. Instrumental variables and a number of robustness checks suggest that the effect is causal.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Malcolm & George Naufal, 2016. "Are Pornography and Marriage Substitutes for Young Men?," Eastern Economic Journal, Palgrave Macmillan;Eastern Economic Association, vol. 42(3), pages 317-334, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:easeco:v:42:y:2016:i:3:p:317-334
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v42/n3/pdf/eej20157a.pdf
    File Function: Link to full text PDF
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v42/n3/full/eej20157a.html
    File Function: Link to full text HTML
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sheena Murray, 2020. "How broadband and cell phone access have impacted marriage and divorce in the US," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 431-459, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:easeco:v:42:y:2016:i:3:p:317-334. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.