Cohabitation and Marriage in the Americas: Geo-historical Legacies and New Trends

The book offers a tour of the historical legacies and regional heterogeneity in unmarried cohabitation, covering: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, Colombia, the Andean region, Brazil, and the Southern Cone. It also explores the diverse meanings of cohabitation from a cross-national perspective and examines the theoretical implications of recent developments on family change in the Americas. 

The book uses data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS), a project dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world. This large sample size enables an empirical testing of one of the currently most powerful explanatory frameworks for changes in family formation around the world, the theory of the Second Demographic Transition. 

With its unique geographical scope, this book will provide researchers with a new understanding into the spectacular rise in premarital cohabitation in the Americas, which has become one of the most salient trends in partnership formation in the region.  

Albert Esteve Palós, demographer and researcher, is director of Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED – Centre for Demographic Studies) and associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). With a degree in Geography he also has a PhD in Demography from the UAB with a thesis titled Nomenclàtor del Censo de Població i la seva aplicació a l'estudi del poblament a Catalunya (Population Census Gazetteer Files and Their Application to the Study of Settlement in Catalonia). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Minnesota, the Institute National d’Études Démographiques in Paris and Princeton University. He has been a grant holder of the Department of Geography at the UAB for the University Teacher Training programme and of the Ramon i Cajal programme at the CED, in addition to obtaining research funding from the Spanish government’s National Plan for R&D, the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia, and the sixth and seventh European Union Framework Programmes. In 2009 he received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for the WorldFam project. His research is concerned with aspects related with couple formation, marriage markets and household structure, on both Spanish and worldwide scales. He has also made a significant contribution in research infrastructure projects, in particular with harmonisation and dissemination of population census microdata, in this case working closely with the Population Centre at the University of Minnesota. He has published chapters in several books and numerous articles which have been published in such magazines as Population Development Review, Demography, International Migration Review and Demographic Research.