Establishing the link between urban residence and cohabitation in the Philippines

Abstract

Does residing in an urban area encourage young women to move in with their premarital romantic partners in the Philippines? Using a propensity score matching model on a sample from the 2013 National Demographic Health Survey, we find that urban residence increases by 8.6 percentage points the incidence of cohabitation among young women. The same result is obtained using probit two- stage least squares and bivariate probit. This finding has policy implications, in particular the need to examine anew the current system of family laws and policies to account for “emerging” non-traditional family types and union formation in response to an increasingly urbanized Philippines.

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Keywords

women, partner, cohabitation, urban, matching, instrument

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