Debate GETTING READY FOR THE MARRIAGE MARKET? FURTHER COMMENT

Grimps & Schneider (2012) again question our finding that divorce risk has an impact on the weight of the married. Unfortunately, they get it wrong the second time as well. As we emphasized in our previous response (Lundborg et al., 2012), their use of the statistical multilevel approach (Schneider & Grimps, 2012) was inadequate, as their analysis suffered from too few clusters at the national level. Recognizing our critique, they now employ the generalized estimation equation (GEE), admittedly being more suited than previous efforts to handle the data structure at hand. In their re-estimation of the original model, they use gender-specific data on divorce risks reported by the United Nation instead of the Lundberg et al. (2007) calculated common divorce risks, their reason for separate estimations for men and women being that ‘... the risk of divorce differs noticeably between men and women... ’ (Grimps & Schneider, 2012). Apparently, this claim needs some clarification. At any point in time, in monogamous heterosexual marriages, there are certainly as many married males as females in a popu-lation, and equally many men and women are under the risk of divorce. However, since there is often an age difference between man and wife within marriage, gende