This paper examines age at first marriage for women and spousal age gap as an indicator for female agency from 1950 to 2005. Using a dataset of 77 LDCs this paper seeks to explore which variables determine differences at a country level in marriage patterns. We look at the influence of urbanisation, education, percentage population of Muslim faith, and family type. We find that education is a key in determining at what age women marry, having as would be expected a positive effect on age at first marriage and depressing spousal age gap. Urbanisation is significant, with a positive effect on age and negative on spousal age gap, although the effect is not very large. The percentage Muslim variable depresses female age at first marriage and increases spousal age gap but only when family type is not controlled for. The initially strong negative effect of percentage population Muslim over the period under consideration on age of first marriage has decreased, which raises some interesting questions about the role of Islam in female empowerment.

This paper investigates the possibilities for the creation of a global dataset on family and household characteristics. This is done by scrutinizing and comparing two prominent data sources on family system classifications. We first focus on historical data, by comparing Emmanuel Todd's classification of countries by family systems with ethnographic data compiled in George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Qualitative and quantitative tests show that the two datasets frequently agree about family traits. Nonetheless, substantial differences exist that are mostly attributable to the focus of the datasets on different regions, and the difficulties in translating local, descriptive studies to hard data. We therefore emphasize that it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of the two datasets and emphasize that robustness checks are necessary in empirical research into family characteristics. We also compare these historical data with present-day data. This comparison suggests that family characteristics and the values associated with them can persist over long periods. Auke Rijpma, Utrecht University, Drift 6, 3512BK Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: a.rijpma@uu.nl Sarah G. Carmichael, Utrecht University, Drift 6, 3512BK Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: s.g. carmichael@uu.nl We would like to thank Tine De Moor, Jan Kok and Jan Luiten van Zanden for their comments on previous versions of this paper. Additionally we are grateful to Jaco Zuijderduijn, Bastian Mönke-diek, Pim de Zwart, Paul Rotering, Benjamin Guilbert, Christiaan van Bochove, Oscar Gelderblom, Maarten Prak, Selin Dilli, Lotte van der Vleuten, and Kati Buzási for their comments during workshops in April and June 2012. We also thank participants at the WEHC 2012 session 'Marriage patterns, agency in households, and economic growth' and three anonymous referees. Last but not least we thank Jutta Bolt for the underlying data, her patience, and always responding to our numerous email questions.10

We review different interpretations of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and explore how they relate to the discussion of the link between the EMP and economic growth. Recently Dennison and Ogilvie have argued that the EMP did not contribute to growth in Early Modern Europe. We argue that the link between the EMP and economic growth is incorrectly conceptualized. Age of marriage is not a good scale for the degree to which countries were characterized by EMP. Rather, the economic effects of the EMP should be seen in the broader context of how marriage responds to changing economic circumstance.

Despite recent progress, women are still disadvantaged by their greater domestic labor commitments and impaired access to well-paid jobs; and, in extreme cases, denied the right to live. This has consequences for the wellbeing of individuals and economic development. Although tools to evaluate country performance in gender equality, especially composite indicators, have been developed since the 1990s, a historical perspective is lacking. This study introduces a composite index of gender equality covering 129 countries from 1950 to 2003. This index measures gender equality in four dimensions (socioeconomic, health, household, and politics). The index shows substantial progress in gender equality, though there is little evidence that less genderequal countries are catching up. Goldin's "quiet revolution" hypothesis is tested as an explanation for this observation, but fails to provide a good explanation. Rather, the long-term institutional and historical characteristics of countries are the main obstacles to convergence.

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Historically, gender inequalities in health status, socio-economic standing and political rights have been large. This chapter documents gender differences in life expectancy and birth rates (to cover health status); in average years of schooling, labour force participation, inheritance rights and marriage age (to cover socioeconomic status); and in parliamentary seats and suffrage (to cover political rights). A composite indicator shows strong progress in reducing gender inequality in the past 60 years in most regions. Only in East Asia and in Eastern Europe this decline stalled in the 1980s. Differences in levels of gender inequality between regions remained large, however: Europe (including Eastern Europe) and the Western Offshoots performed best, although no country reached full gender equality. The Middle East and North Africa (mainly due to weak political rights) and South and Southeast Asia (due to skewed sex ratios at birth) performed worst.

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This article introduces a new dataset of historical family characteristics based on ethnographic literature. The novelty of the dataset lies in the fact that it is constructed at the level of the ethnic group. To test the possibilities of the dataset, we construct a measure of family constraints on women’s agency from it and explore its correlation to a number of geographical factors.