Early traces of the Second Demographic Transition in Bulgaria: a joint analysis of marital and non-marital union formation

In this paper, we study entry into the first conjugal union among young women in Bulgaria in 1980 through 2004 based on data from the national Gender and Generations Survey conducted in 2004. We use an extension of piecewise-constant hazard regression to analyze jointly the transition into a cohabitational union and directly into marriage. This extension will allow us to compare the relative risks of covariates across the two competing transitions, a comparison which infeasible otherwise. In this manner we find, among many other things, that women in the Roma sub-population have more than twice as high a tendency to start a cohabitation as to start a marriage at each age, ceteris paribus, while for ethnic Bulgarian women the relationship is more like 1.5. We also find that a pregnancy leads to a dramatic increase in the rate of both kinds of union formation; the increase is by a factor of over 20 for marriage formation and “only” a factor of around 10 for entry into cohabitation, again ceteris paribus. The standardized marriage intensity for non-pregnant women without children has fallen strongly by a factor of more than six over the period of investigation; the standardized rate of cohabitation has been much more stable and has only fallen by some forty percent, mostly toward the end of the period. These features have not appeared in previous analyses.