European marriage pattern causes preliminary research

Just earlier today, I found out about the so-called “European marriage pattern” (EMP) and “Hajnal line”. The latter seems less supported by data than the former. Please look at the linked Wikipedia articles to find out what they are.

This got me curious about the possible causes of marriage patterns, generally, and the EMP specifically. (Much of the controversy seems to be about its effects, i.e., whether the EMP leads to improved economic growth or not.) While it would be good to properly think this through from principles, I wanted to see what theories have been raised about it. From a cursory search, apparently there have been the following:

• Racial and biological theories.— The “Hajnal line” Wikipedia article makes several mentions of racist theories about the line; they apparently rely on the line itself being factually supported, which is questionable. The idea seems to be that the Slavic peoples, for reasons inherent to their race, favor a reproductive strategy used by species whose offspring are individually expendable, such as certain insects; so-called r/K selection would seem to be related here. (Personally, I find such theories distasteful, but given how cursory my research has been so far, I have no arguments against them.)
• Catholic Christian culture and regulations.— The Catholic Church seems to have had various internal regulations and theological ideas which favor the marriage habits corresponding to the EMP, and nuclear families generally. These explanations are covered at some length in the “Western European marriage pattern” Wikipedia article, and in this Mises Institute article.
• The Black Death.— This other Mises Institute article cites, in passing, a different theory “that the Black Death aided the EMP by trigging a labor market for women.” A 2013 academic article by Tracy Dennison (PDF), focusing mostly on the EMP’s effects, also mentions the idea that “in England after the Black Death, it is claimed, labour scarcity and a shift from arable to pastoral agriculture increased demand for women’s labour outside the household, encouraging a move towards late marriage, high lifetime celibacy, and a calibration of marriage decisions to economic fluctuations.”
• Corporative institutions.— The just-cited Dennison article (PDF) also seems to mention how “strong corporative institutions (communities, guilds, universities, firms) which benefited economic growth by guaranteeing property rights, enforcing contracts, and facilitating exchange” made it easier to have a network of people you trust without a large family. This is mainly claimed to be an effect, but also apparently a cause, of the EMP.

That’s all I have seen for now. These things might all be part of the answer (though I wouldn’t consider the first one). As the following passage from the Dennison article (PDF) highlights, however, the range of currently available theories seems unsatisfying, and more work should probably be done:

No variant of this new literature unambiguously spells out the direction of the causal relationships involved. On the one hand, the EMP is supposed to have created a better position for women. But on the other, greater female autonomy is supposed to have given rise to the EMP. And in some variants, both marriage patterns and women’s position are ascribed to underlying factors such as European or Christian cultural norms, the Black Death, or pastoral agriculture. The evident endogeneity of the different variables limits the scope of these claims to the merely descriptive assertion that the EMP was associated with a higher status for women, which in turn benefited the economy.

But even this claim is at odds with the evidence. As the women’s history literature has shown, women had a good economic position in some societies with the EMP and a bad one in others. [...]