A dynamic model of the marriage market-Part 2: simulation of marital states and application to empirical data
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1Physics-Durban Academic Group, School of Chemistry and Physics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban 4001, South Africa.
Abstract:
A dynamic, two-sex, age-structured marriage model is presented. Part 1 focused on first marriage only and described a marriage market matching algorithm. In Part 2 the model is extended to include divorce, widowing, and remarriage. The model produces a self-consistent set of marital states distributed by age and sex in a stable population by means of a gender-symmetric numerical method. The model is compared with empirical data for the case of Zambia. Furthermore, a dynamic marriage function for a changing population is demonstrated in simulations of three hypothetical scenarios of elevated mortality in young to middle adulthood. The marriage model has its primary application to simulation of HIV-AIDS epidemics in African countries.
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