Coale-McNeil Marriage Model

The Coale-McNeil model is a parametric description of how first marriages are distributed by age. Ansley Coale and Donald McNeil showed in 1972 that the age pattern of first marriage in widely different populations has a common shape, captured by a single standard curve that can be shifted and stretched. Three parameters — an origin age at which marriage starts, a scale that controls how spread out the process is, and the ultimate proportion who ever marry — reproduce almost any observed first-marriage schedule, giving demographers a compact and comparable summary of nuptiality.