Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing

Shelly Lundberg, Robert Pollak and Jenna Stearns

No 2017-016, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: The last 60 years have seen the emergence of a dramatic socioeconomic gradient in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and childbearing. The divide is between college graduates and others: those without four-year degrees have family patterns and trajectories very similar to those of high school graduates. We document these trends and show that, compared with college graduates, less-educated women are more likely to enter into cohabiting partnerships early and bear children while cohabiting, are less likely to transition quickly into marriage, and have much higher divorce rates. There are two broad sets of explanations for these differences. Conventional explanations focus on the diminished economic prospects of less-educated men. We propose an alternative explanation focusing on educational differences in demand for marital commitment. As the gains from traditional gender-based specialization have declined, the value of marriage has decreased relative to cohabitation, which offers many of the gains of co-residence with less commitment. We argue that college graduate parents use marriage as a commitment device to facilitate intensive joint investments in their children. For less educated couples for whom such investments are less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. The resulting socioeconomic divergence has implications for children and for future inequality.

Keywords: college premium; Marriage; educational attainment; family inequality; household income inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H31 I30 J10 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo
Note: ECI, FI, IP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Lundbe ... amily-inequality.pdf First version, March 1, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing (2016)
Working Paper: Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().