Coupled
Educational Assortative Mating and Earnings Inequality in the United States
Richard Breen & Leire Salazar
American Journal of Sociology, November 2011, Pages 808-843
Abstract:
This article investigates how changes in educational assortative mating affected the growth in earnings inequality among households in the United States between the late 1970s and early 2000s. The authors find that these changes had a small, negative effect on inequality: there would have been more inequality in earnings in the early 2000s if educational assortative mating patterns had remained as they were in the 1970s. Given the educational distribution of men and women in the United States, educational assortative mating can have only a weak impact on inequality, and educational sorting among partners is a poor proxy for sorting on earnings.
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On the time allocation of married couples since 1960
Michael Bar & Oksana Leukhina
Journal of Macroeconomics, December 2011, Pages 491-510
Abstract:
In the last half a century, married females more than doubled their workforce participation and significantly reduced their time spent on home production. Using a model of family decision making with home production and individual earnings heterogeneity, we subject two prominent explanations for this aggregate change, namely, the evolution of the gender earnings gap and the cost of home appliances, to quantitative tests with respect to changes in participation for disaggregated groups of couples and trends in time spent in leisure and home production activities. We find that both forces are needed to understand the evolution of married female time allocation over time, although the falling cost of home appliances is a dominant explanation for the time allocation outside of workplace, while the gender earnings gap is the dominant explanation for the workforce participation decision.
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Reconsidering the "Good Divorce"
Paul Amato, Jennifer Kane & Spencer James
Family Relations, December 2011, Pages 511-524
Abstract:
This study attempted to assess the notion that a "good divorce" protects children from the potential negative consequences of marital dissolution. A cluster analysis of data on postdivorce parenting from 944 families resulted in three groups: cooperative coparenting, parallel parenting, and single parenting. Children in the cooperative coparenting (good divorce) cluster had the smallest number of behavior problems and the closest ties to their fathers. Nevertheless, children in this cluster did not score significantly better than other children on 10 additional outcomes. These findings provide only modest support for the good divorce hypothesis.
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Judith Hellerstein & Melinda Sandler Morrill
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, August 2011
Abstract:
For almost a century, anecdotes have suggested that divorce rates decline during recessions. However, until very recently there has been surprisingly little formal empirical evidence on whether such a link exists, let alone its magnitude if it does. Moreover, the anticipated direction of the effect is ambiguous theoretically. Although previous studies have concluded that individual job loss destabilizes marriages, macroeconomic conditions may affect divorce probabilities even for those not directly experiencing a job shock. We add to the few existing contemporaneous studies of the effects of macroeconomic shocks on divorce by conducting an empirical analysis of the relationship between state-level unemployment rates and state-level divorce rates using vital statistics data on divorces in the United States from 1976-2009. We find a significant and robust negative relationship between the unemployment and divorce rates, whereby a one percentage point rise in the unemployment rate is associated with a decrease of 0.043 divorces per one thousand people, or about a one percent fall in the divorce rate. The result that divorce is pro-cyclical is robust to a host of alternative empirical specifications, to disaggregating by state characteristics and time period, to expanding the unemployment series back to 1970, and to using alternative measures of local economic conditions.
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Broken Boundaries or Broken Marriages? Racial Intermarriage and Divorce in the United States
Vincent Kang Fu & Nicholas Wolfinger
Social Science Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 1096-1117
Objective: Several recent studies have investigated the consequences of racial intermarriage for marital stability. None of these studies properly control for first-order racial differences in divorce risk, therefore failing to appropriately identify the effect of intermarriage. Our article builds on an earlier generation of studies to develop a model that appropriately identifies the consequences of crossing racial boundaries in matrimony.
Methods: We analyze the 1995 and 2002 National Survey of Family Growth using a parametric event-history model called a sickle model. To appropriately identify the effect of interracial marriage we use the interaction of wife's race and husband's race.
Results: We find elevated divorce rates for Latino/white intermarriages but not for black/white intermarriages. Seventy-two percent of endogamous Latino marriages remain intact at 15 years, but only 58 percent of Latino husband/white wife and 64 percent of white husband/Latina wife marriages are still intact.
Conclusions: We have identified an important deficiency in previous studies and provide a straightforward resolution. Although higher rates of Latino/white intermarriage may indicate more porous group boundaries, the greater instability of these marriages suggests that these boundaries remain resilient.
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Adolescents' Gender Mistrust: Variations and Implications for the Quality of Romantic Relationships
Kei Nomaguchi et al.
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2011, Pages 1032-1047
Abstract:
Recent research demonstrates that perceptions of gender mistrust are implicated in lower marriage rates among low-income populations. Yet few quantitative studies have examined the factors predicting gender mistrust during adolescence and whether it influences the quality of subsequent nonmarital romantic relationships. Analysis of three waves of data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (N = 1,106) indicates that in addition to neighborhood poverty rates, parents' own gender mistrust and parent-child relationship quality are related to adolescents' gender mistrust, suggesting that parents play an important role in influencing adolescents' developing feelings of gender mistrust. Perceptions of gender mistrust are not related to whether adolescents are involved in dating relationships, but are linked to higher levels of jealousy and verbal conflict in adolescents' subsequent romantic relationships, albeit only for male adolescents.
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Theo Engelen & Paul Puschmann
History of the Family, 24 October 2011, Pages 387-400
Abstract:
In this article a comparison is drawn between the historical Western European marriage pattern (WEMP), and more recent trends in nuptiality in Arab countries. This comparison makes clear that marriage behavior in the present-day Arab world shows striking similarities to nuptiality patterns which have been described by Hajnal and adherents as typically Western European. Due to a combination of economic hardship, ever growing costs in the marriage ceremony, prolonged education and the emancipation of women, people in the Arab world have started to marry at ever higher ages during the past decades. Moreover, there are indications that universal marriage is in decline. Just as Western European couples in the nineteenth century had to spend years of saving in order to meet the economic requirements for marriage, young couples in today's Arab world have to postpone marriage as they are only at a more advanced age able to bear the economic burden involved in getting married. Striking is also the fact that marriage restriction in both societies started at a moment when the social and legal position of women was improving (in late Medieval Western Europe and today in the Arab world). However, in some ways the historical Western European marriage pattern differs from the contemporary Arab pattern. No other marriage regime has been able to completely reduce fertility and balance population growth to economic development. Whereas population growth in pre-twentieth century Europe was only restricted by nuptiality control, demographic expansion in present day Arab society is also restricted by modern family planning. Declining nuptiality in the Arab world can however not, as some might assume, be put under the header of the Second Demographic Transition observed in Western societies, from the 1960s on. After all, until today, a rise in cohabitation and extra-marital births has not occured in the Arab world.
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Direct and indirect transmission of relationship functioning across generations
Miriam Ehrensaft et al.,
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Relationship functioning is assumed to propagate across subsequent generations, but most studies have lacked appropriate methodologies to test this assumption prospectively. In a randomly selected sample of youth (N = 821) followed prospectively for over 25 years across multiple generations, we examined the association of romantic engagement (i.e., emotional involvement and closeness) between parents with offspring romantic relationship quality. We tested two developmental pathways linking parents' romantic engagement with offspring adult romantic relationship quality, the first operating via parenting practices, and the second operating via adolescent depression. Parents' romantic engagement predicted offspring romantic relationship quality a mean of 17 years later, net age and socioeconomic status. Results supported a developmental pathway from parents' romantic engagement at offspring mean age 14, to parenting at offspring mean age 16, to offspring socioemotional functioning at mean age 22, and offspring romantic relationship quality at mean age 33. However, the influence of parents' romantic engagement on offsprings' adult romantic relationship quality does not appear to operate via a pathway of adolescent depression. Implications for prevention are discussed.
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The Specter of Divorce: Views From Working- and Middle-Class Cohabitors
Amanda Miller, Sharon Sassler & Dela Kusi-Appouh
Family Relations, December 2011, Pages 602-616
Abstract:
Young Americans increasingly express apprehension about their ability to successfully manage intimate relationships. Partially in response, cohabitation has become normative over the past few decades. Little research, however, examines social class distinctions in how emerging adults perceive challenges to sustaining intimate unions. We examine cohabitors' views of divorce and how these color their sentiments regarding marriage. Data are from in-depth interviews with 122 working- and middle-class cohabitors. More than two thirds of respondents mentioned concerns with divorce. Working-class women, in particular, view marriage less favorably than do their male and middle-class counterparts, in part because they see marriage as hard to exit and are reluctant to assume restrictive gender roles. Middle-class cohabitors are more likely to have concrete wedding plans and believe that marriage signifies a greater commitment than does cohabitation. These differences in views of marriage and divorce may help explain the bifurcation of cohabitation outcomes among working- and middle-class cohabitors.
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The Fragility of Estimated Effects of Unilateral Divorce Laws on Divorce Rates
Jin Young Lee & Gary Solon
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, August 2011
Abstract:
Following an influential article by Friedberg (1998) on the response of divorce rates to the adoption of unilateral divorce laws, Wolfers (2006) explored the sensitivity of Friedberg's results to allowing for dynamic response. We in turn explore the sensitivity of Wolfers's results to variations in estimation method and functional form, and we find that the results are extremely fragile. We conclude first that the impact of unilateral divorce laws remains unclear. Second, we make the methodological point that identification in differences-in-differences research becomes weaker in the presence of dynamics, especially in the presence of unit-specific time trends.
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Economic development and parental status homogamy: A study of 19th century France
Ineke Maas et al.
History of the Family, 24 October 2011, Pages 371-386
Abstract:
This study investigates the claim that industrialization led to a decrease of parental status homogamy. Contrary to previous research industrialization is not indicated by historical time, nor measured as a macro-development, but instead brides and bridegrooms who are more involved in the industrial labour market are compared with those who are less involved. The theory of preferences, third parties and meeting opportunities is used to derive the hypotheses that young persons (1) with an industrial occupation, (2) who are intergenerationally mobile, and (3) with formal training marry more often outside their parental status group. Hypotheses are tested using the Tra-dataset on France for the period 1803-1899. Brides and bridegrooms working in an industrial occupation and intergenerationally mobile bridegrooms are indeed found to marry less homogamously with respect to parental status.
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How Money Matters: College, Motherhood, Earnings, and Wives' Housework
Margaret Usdansky & Wendy Parker
Journal of Family Issues, November 2011, Pages 1449-1473
Abstract:
Using new data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), the authors consider how educational and parental status influence the relationship between wives' relative earnings and the time they devote to housework in a climate of heightened gender egalitarianism and growing similarity between women's and men's time use. The authors capitalize on the large samples in the American Time Use Survey to study four groups of wives whose varying educational and parental statuses strengthen tests of theoretical claims regarding bargaining, gender display, and wives' autonomy. Among wives with children at home and without a college degree, the authors find that relative earnings bear a curvilinear relationship to housework time, supporting predictions derived from exchange and gender display theories. Among wives with children and a college degree, and among wives without children regardless of degree status, relative earnings are unrelated to housework. In contrast, wives' own earnings are inversely related to housework time across all four groups. The authors' analyses suggest that educational and parental contexts jointly shape the relationship between wives' earnings and their housework and the relative importance of bargaining, gender display, and autonomy.
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Lindon Eaves & Peter Hatemi
Social Science Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 1253-1278
Objectives: Contemporary scholarly debate emphasizes the importance of spouse selection on population stratification, typically focusing on the traits of spouses themselves. In this study spouses and their parents were analyzed to resolve the effects of direct spousal assortment from family background assortment on three social traits that spouses correlate the highest: education, church attendance, and political affiliation.
Methods: The data set is comprised of a core of spousal pairs and their parents assessed by self-report and a more extensive set of individuals on whom there are only ratings by relatives for educational attainment, church attendance, and political preference. Structural equation models were fitted to the observed polychoric correlations by diagonal weighted least squares.
Results: For education and church attendance, assortment was based primarily on the traits of the spouses themselves, but models including independent assortment for the traits of parents-in-law gave a better fit. For political affiliation, assortment based on social background influenced by the traits of both parents gave a better fit.
Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that in humans, spousal similarity may reflect processes of selection and stratification that are more complex than commonly supposed in most models for family resemblance and social diversity.
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Mating (marriage) patterns and economic development
Alfonso Díez Minguela
History of the Family, 24 October 2011, Pages 312-330
Abstract:
This paper looks at the relationship between economic development and mating (marriage) patterns in the very long run. For this purpose we introduce the Goldin and the Kuznets curves which relate female labour and income inequality with economic development respectively. To some extent, the Goldin and the Kuznets curves have followed opposite paths, which in turn, could illustrate how economic development has had an impact on mating (marriage) patterns, and thus household formation. The likely convergence in mating patterns among hunter-gatherers across societies vanished after the Neolithic revolution. Then, African polygyny and the ‘European' marriage pattern developed into the most significant exceptions to the traditional dictate of nature "...an early attachment to one woman" (Malthus, 1798: pp. 15). Nowadays, monogamy and late attachments have become the norm rather than an exception.