This paper asks whether marriage decisions of unmarried mature couples are driven by the prospect of financial advantages for the later widowed after one partner has suffered a serious health shock. We hypothesize that, in contrast to traditional marriage models, such health shocks may induce unmarried couples to obtain economic benefits, such as survivors’ pensions in particular, through marriage in advance of one partner’s death. This question has not yet been studied empirically. Hazard models capturing unobserved effects are applied to longitudinal data of the German Socioeconomic Panel. It turns out that the probability of marriage after male partners’ health shocks can increase significantly depending on the amount of expected survivors’ pensions for the (likely) surviving female partners. In contrast, an increased probability of marriage after health shocks to women (depending on the expected financial benefits to men) was not found. These findings are supported by various robustness checks. Economic and political implications are discussed and the results are placed in an international context.

本文询问未婚成熟夫妇的婚姻决定是否是由其中一方遭受严重健康冲击后丧偶的经济利益前景所驱动的。我们假设，与传统的婚姻模式相反，这种健康冲击可能会促使未婚夫妇通过在一方去世前结婚来获得经济利益，尤其是遗属养老金。这个问题尚未经过实证研究。捕获未观察到的影响的危险模型适用于德国社会经济小组的纵向数据。事实证明，男性伴侣遭受健康冲击后结婚的可能性会显着增加，具体取决于（可能）幸存女性伴侣的预期幸存者养老金金额。相比之下，没有发现女性在健康受到冲击后结婚的可能性增加（取决于男性的预期经济利益）。这些发现得到了各种稳健性检查的支持。讨论了经济和政治影响，并将结果置于国际背景下。