BACKGROUND: Wilson (1987) argued that race differences in the frequency of marriage from the 1960s to the 1980s resulted from a shortage of marriageable men in the Black community. A large literature used spatially defined measures of male marriageability to predict marriage rates of women. These studies concluded that the availability of marriageable men can explain only a fraction of race differences in marriage. I argue that this finding may reflect errors in the measurement of the availability of marriageable spouses. METHODS: My analysis assesses marriage rates from the perspective of men instead of women, allowing direct assessment of men's economic positions without resorting to fuzzy spatial indicators. I develop new measures of first marriage rates for the 1960-1980 censuses and combine them with survey-based measures for 2008-2019. I use classic decomposition methods to assess the changing relationship of economic composition to race differences in male first marriage rates over the 1960-2019 period. RESULTS: century, race differences in economic composition were sufficiently large to account for most race differences in first marriage rates, but the size of the economic component declined dramatically over time. CONCLUSIONS: century, the role of male economic circumstances for race differences in marriage rates has diminished, but it remains substantial. CONTRIBUTION: Leveraging a new research strategy and a new measure of first marriage, this analysis provides a consistent decomposition of race differences in first marriage rates over six decades.
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