Mortality by marital status in the Czech Republic before and after transition.

Married live longer and their advantage tends to increase with time. Whether marital benefits result from selection or protection is still lively discussed. But while the marital advantage increases, the share of the married in the population decreases. We explored the dynamics of marital status mortality differentials in the Czech Republic since 1961. Unlinked death counts and census marital structures were used. The differentials were measured by life expectancy at age 30; its differences and changes were decomposed by the step-wise replacement algorithm. Mortality differences by marital status have considerably increased between 1961 and 1991 due to the worsening survival of the unmarried adults. Since 1991 the differentials rose only slightly and shifted to older age groups. Never-married lag the most, with 9.58 years shorter life expectancy compared to married men (7.70 years for women) in 2010. The decline of marriage and further increase of divorciality resulted in a loss of 0.89 years of the overall male life expectancy. Individuals lacking spousal support were particularly vulnerable before the transition. In spite of their mortality recovery after 1991, they are still far behind the married ones. A plausible explanation is that the marital benefits are now available to more positively selected population.