Associations between household arrangements for couples and satisfaction with life

Abstract

This paper investigated the relationship between marital arrangements and satisfaction with life in Brazil. Initially, household arrangements with couples in Brazil were classified into seven different groups: One for marriage or relationships indistinguishable from marriage, and six for consensual unions. This allowed the paper to empirically address the natural heterogeneity of marriage and cohabitation and their relationship to levels of satisfaction with life. Then, taking into account the fact that these associations are plagued by endogeneity, econometric models addressed whether the different household arrangements were correlated with different levels of satisfaction with life. After this, the reverse link was also analyzed with the use of econometric models. The results suggest that household arrangement types were weakly or non-significantly correlated with the levels of life satisfaction. Conversely, life satisfaction levels were significantly correlated with the different types of household arrangements.