Download This Paper"Will You Marry Me"...in December? Tax-Induced Wedding Date Shifting and Mismatching in Long-Term Relationships
70 Pages Posted: 10 Apr 2019 Last revised: 10 Sep 2025
Date Written: September 10, 2025
Abstract
We use administrative micro-level data on the full population of all 2,537,713 divorce cases in Germany over the 2006-2020 period to empirically show that marriages with weddings at year end last considerably shorter than does the average (median) marriage. Specifically, the average (median) difference, conditional on divorce, between marriages with weddings in December and marriages with weddings in all other months is 466 (534) days, with an overall length of marriage of 5,276 (4,542) days. We attribute this empirical observation to the German marriage tax benefit, which is granted for the entire calendar year if the couple is married for at least one day in that year. Owing to this year-end threshold cliff, couples' legal wedding dates are shifted forward compared with the counterfactual scenario, i.e., the absence of any marriage tax benefit. Most importantly, the year-end threshold cliff also induces couples with low levels of matching quality to marry when they should not; hence, mismatching in long-term relationships results.
Keywords: marriage tax benefit, mismatching, long-term relationships, timing of weddings, administrative data, Germany JEL Classification: J12, H24, H31, K34
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