Does Marriage Matter for Kids? The impact of Legal Marriage on Child Outcomes” (original) (raw)
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Does Marriage Matter for Children? Assessing the Causal Impact of Legal Marriage
2007
This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow’s Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage. Sweden’s rich administrative data sources enable us to identify the children
2008
Although a positive male marriage premium has been found in many studies, the source of the premium is unclear and debated – does it result from selection or specialization? Our paper analyzes trends in earnings for married and long-term cohabiting Swedish men, women, and couples who are parents of a random sample of about 130,000 children born in 1977-87. We use panel data on parents’ earnings for six years between 1985 and 1995 to analyze trends in earnings before and after marriage. To identify the effect of marriage on earnings we use the marriage boom in Sweden in 1989, created by the reform of the widow’s pension system and fixed-effects estimation. Our results show that most of the male marriage premium can be explained by positive selection whereas the female marriage penalty seems to reflect both reduced hours of work after marriage, i.e., increased specialization in home production, and other negative effects on earnings of marriage and childcare. The findings suggest that...
2010
We examine whether marriage leads to specialization in Sweden by implementing a model that differentiates specialization in the household by cohabitation and marriage. Our paper evaluates this model using panel data to analyze trends in earnings before and after marriage between 1985 and 1995 for married and long-term cohabiting Swedish couples with children. To identify the effect of marriage on earnings we use the reform of the widow's pension system that resulted in a marriage boom in Sweden in 1989 and difference-indifference estimation. Our results show that most of the male marriage premium can be explained by positive selection whereas the female marriage penalty reflects increased specialization in home production and childcare. The findings suggest that the positive selection of men into marriage translates into the increased specialization of women. We also find evidence that marriage facilitates specialization in the few couples where mothers earn more than fathers, resulting in a marriage premium for women and a marriage penalty for men. Finally, we find that the net effect of marriage on family earnings is zero because the male marriage premium is offset by the female marriage penalty. Our results show that specialization results from the legal arrangement of marriage, not from the living arrangement of the household.
The Economics of the Family Chapter 9: Investment in Schooling and the Marriage Market ∗
2010
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a simple equilibrium framework for the joint determination of pre-marital schooling and marriage patterns of men and women. Couples sort according to education and, therefore, changes in the aggregate supply of educated individuals affects who marries whom and the division of the gains from marriage. Unlike other attributes such as race and ethnic background, schooling is an acquired trait that is subject to choice. Acquiring education yields two different returns: First, a higher earning capacity and better job opportunities in the labor market. Second, an improvement in the intra-marital share of the surplus one can extract in the marriage market. Educational attainment influences intra-marital shares by raising the prospects of marriage with an educated spouse and thus raising household income upon marriage, and by affecting the competitive strength outside marriage and the spousal roles within marriage. The gains from schooling within ma...
Proceed With Caution? Parents' Union Dissolution and Children's Educational Achievement
Journal of Marriage and Family, 2014
Using high-quality Norwegian register data on 49,879 children from 23,655 families, the authors estimated sibling fixed-effects models to explore whether children who are younger at the time of a parental union dissolution perform less well academically, as measured by their grades at age 16, than their older siblings who have spent more time living with both biological parents. Results from a baseline model suggest a positive age gradient that is consistent with findings in some of the extant family structure literature. Once birth order is taken into account, the gradient reverses. When analyses also control for grade inflation by adding year of birth to the model, only those children who experience a dissolution just prior to receiving their grades appear relatively disadvantaged. The
Unobserved variables and marital status The schooling connection
Journal of Population Economics, 1992
Studies increasingly indicate that some of the characteristics of individuals are jointly determined with marital status, fertility, and labor supply. This study focuses on the effect of schooling on marital status. A Hausman-type test shows that schooling cannot be legitimately treated as an exogenous determinant of marriage and divorce. It is shown that if schooling is treated as an exogenous variable, the negative effect of schooling on the odds of marriage is underestimated. Further, the results indicate that schooling has a significant negative effect on divorce if it is treated as an exogenous variable; the coefficient for schooling is positive if it is treated as an endogenous variable.
Stability and Change in the Educational Gradient of Divorce. A Comparison of Seventeen Countries
European Sociological Review, 2006
In a series of papers, William J. Goode argued that the relationship between modernization and the class composition of divorce is inverse. Starting from his hypothesis, we examine the relationship between female education and the risk of divorce over time in 17 countries. We expect that the relationship differs across countries and across time, so that women with higher education have a higher risk of divorce in countries and at times when the social and economic costs of divorce are high, and that there is no relationship or a negative relationship where these costs are lower. Using discrete-time event-history techniques on data on first marriages from the Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS), we find that women with higher education had a higher risk of divorce in France, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain. We do not find a relationship between education and divorce in Estonia, Finland, West-Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Sweden, and Switzerland, nor, depending on the model specification, in Flanders and Norway. In Austria, Lithuania, and the United States, the educational gradient of divorce is negative. Furthermore, as predicted by our hypotheses, the educational gradient becomes increasingly negative in Flanders, and the United States. We explore this variation across time and countries in more detail with multilevel models and direct measures on the legal, social, and economic environment of the countries. We find that the de-institutionalization of marriage and unconventional family practices are associated with a negative educational gradient of divorce, while welfare state expenditure is associated with a more positive gradient.