This paper studies the relationship between characteristics of men’s place of residence and the probability of entering marriage in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. We link micro-information from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) with district-level data to estimate discrete-time multilevel logit models. Our results support the widely accepted idea about the importance of men’s individual economic status in marital decisions. They furthermore indicate a negative relationship between women’s aggregate labor force participation and male transition rates to marriage, which could be interpreted as evidence for the popular ‘economic independence hypothesis’ of marital behavior.
Complementary, we put forward an interpretation of female employment rates as indicators of a region’s degree of secularization, for example. Consistent with a previous study on female nuptiality in Germany, our findings (which also include a significant latent contextual effect) suggest that a man’s propensity to marry is influenced by the regional socio-cultural milieu he lives in.