Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'marriage'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 15
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Working PaperWho Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-30
Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class group. We distinguish between two possible explanations: a lack of exposure to other groups versus a preference to marry within group. We develop an instrument for neighborhood exposure to opposite-sex members of other race and class groups using variation in sex ratios among nearby birth cohorts in childhood neighborhoods. We then test whether increased exposure results in more interracial (white-Black) and interclass (top-to-bottom parent income quartile) marriages. Increased exposure to opposite-sex members of other class groups generates a substantial increase in interclass marriage, but increased exposure to other race groups has no detectable effect on interracial marriage. We use these results to estimate a spatial model of the marriage market and quantify the impact of reducing residential segregation in general equilibrium. For small changes in exposure, the model implies effects in line with recent estimates from policy experiments. We then use the model to assess the overall contribution of segregation and find that residential segregation has large effects on interclass, but not interracial, marriage.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSame-Sex Couples and the Child Earnings Penalty
May 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-25
Existing work has shown that the entry of a child into a household results in a large and sustained increase in the earnings gap between male and female partners in opposite-sex couples. Potential reasons for this include work-life preferences, comparative advantage over earnings, and gender norms. We expand this analysis of the child penalty to examine earnings of individuals in same sex couples in the U.S. around the time their first child enters the household. Using linked survey and administrative data and event-study methodology, we confirm earlier work finding a child penalty for women in opposite-sex couples. We find this is true even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while on average the earnings of primary and equal earners remain relatively constant. While this finding seems supportive of a norm related to equality within same-sex couples, transition analysis suggests a more complicated story.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFamily Formation and the Great Recession
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-42R
This paper studies how exposure to recessions as a young adult impacts long-term family formation in the context of the Great Recession. Using confidential linked survey data from U.S. Census, I document that exposure to a 1 pp larger unemployment shock in the Great Recession in one's early 20s is associated with a 0.8 pp decline in likelihood of marriage by their early 30s. These effects are not explained by substitution toward cohabitation with unmarried partners, are concentrated among whites, and are notably absent for individuals from high-income families. The estimated effects on fertility are also negative but imprecisely estimated. A back-of-the-envelope exercise suggests that these reductions in family formation may have increased the long-run impact of the Recession on consumption relative to its impact on individual earnings by a considerable extent.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe effect of child support on selection into marriage and fertility
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-04
Child support policies in the United States have expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s and now cover 1 in 5 children. This paper studies the consequences of child support for marriage and fertility decisions. I first introduce a model showing that child support enforces ex ante commitment from men to provide financial support in the event of a child, which (1) increases premarital sex among couples unlikely to marry, and (2) reduces the abortion rate, by lessening the cost of raising a child as a single mom. Using variation in the timing and geography of the rollout of U.S. child support laws relative to the timing of pregnancy, from 1977 to 1992, I find that marriages following an unplanned pregnancy are less likely to occur under strengthened child support laws, accounting for about a 7-8 percentage point reduction relative to a base of 38 percent. I find that the child support rollout reduced the abortion rate by 1-2 per 1000 women aged 15-44, off a base of 28, representing about 50 percent of the total decline in the abortion rate over this period.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Parental Gender Earnings Gap in the United States
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-68
This paper examines the parental gender earnings gap, the within-couple differences in earnings over time, before and after the birth of a child. The presence and timing of children are important components of the gender wage gap, but there is selection in both decisions. We estimate the earnings gap between male and female spouses over time, which allows us to control for this timing choice as well as other shared external earnings shifters, such as the local labor market. We use Social Security Administration Detail Earnings Records (SSA-DER) data linked to the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine a panel of earnings from 1978 to 2011 for the individuals in the SIPP sample. Our main results show that the spousal earnings gap doubles between two years before the birth of the first child and the year after that child is born. After the child's first year of life the gap continues to grow for the next five years, but at a much slower rate, then tapers off and even begins to fall once the child reaches school-age.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperConsidering the Use of Stock and Flow Outcomes in Empirical Analyses: An Examination of Marriage Data
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-64
This paper fills an important void assessing how the use of stock outcomes as compared to flow outcomes may yield disparate results in empirical analyses, despite often being used interchangeably. We compare analyses using a stock outcome, marital status, to those using a flow outcome, entry into marriage, from the same dataset, the American Community Survey. This paper considers two different questions and econometric approaches using these alternative measures: the effect of the Affordable Care Act young adult provision on marriage using a difference-indifferences approach and the relationship between aggregate unemployment rates and marriage rates using a simpler ordinary least squares regression approach. Results from both analyses show stock and flow data yield divergent results in terms of sign and significance. Additional analyses suggest prior-period temporary shocks and migration may contribute to this discrepancy. These results suggest using caution when conducting analyses using stock data as they may produce false negative results or spurious false positive results, which could in turn give rise to misleading policy implications.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDOES FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES? EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-29
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of the average child. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.5% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 11% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. Even with extreme assumptions about selection, these estimates are large enough to imply that family planning programs directly increased children's resources, including increases in mothers' paid work and increased childbearing within marriage.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSelection and Specialization in the Evolution of Marriage Earnings Gaps
October 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-36
We examine changes in marriage and earnings patterns across four cohorts born between 1936 and 1975, using data from a series of Survey of Income and Program Participation panels linked to administrative data on earnings. We find that for both men and women, marriage has become increasingly positively associated with education and earnings potential. We compare ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effect (FE) estimates of the earnings differential associated with marriage. We find that the marriage earnings gap fell for women in fixed-effect estimates implying that the impact of specialization has diminished over time. We also find that increasingly positive selection into marriage means that OLS estimates overstate the reduction in the marriage earnings gap. While our findings imply that marriage is no longer associated with lower earnings among women without minor children in our most recent cohort, the motherhood gap remains large. Among men, we find that the marriage premium actually increases for more recent birth cohorts in fixed-effects regressions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTrends in Earnings Inequality and Earnings Instability among U.S. Couples: How Important is Assortative Matching?
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-04
We examine changes in inequality and instability of the combined earnings of married couples over the 1980-2009 period using two U.S. panel data sets: Social Security earnings data matched to Survey of Income and Program Participation panels (SIPP-SSA) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Relative to male earnings inequality, the inequality of couples' earnings is both lower in levels and rises by a smaller amount. We also find that couples' earnings instability is lower in levels compared to male earnings instability and actually declines in the SIPP-SSA data. While wives' earnings played an important role in dampening the rise in inequality and year-to-year variation in resources at the family level, we find that marital sorting and coordination of labor supply decisions at the family level played a minor role. Comparing actual couples to randomly paired simulated couples, we find very similar trends in earnings inequality and instability.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY PLANNING: NEW EVIDENCE ON THE LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF INCREASING ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTION
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-15
This paper assembles new evidence on some of the longer-term consequences of U.S. family planning policies, defined in this paper as those increasing legal or financial access to modern contraceptives. The analysis leverages two large policy changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s: first, the interaction of the birth control pill's introduction with Comstock-era restrictions on the sale of contraceptives and the repeal of these laws after Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; and second, the expansion of federal funding for local family planning programs from 1964 to 1973. Building on previous research that demonstrates both policies' effects on fertility rates, I find suggestive evidence that individuals' access to contraceptives increased their children's college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later.View Full Paper PDF
