Does the Student-Loan Burden Weigh into the Decision to Start a Family?

Dora Gicheva

No 11-14, UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics

Abstract: I examine the relationship between student debt and the timing of marriage. The life-cycle consumption smoothing model implies that student loans should have a very small effect on consumption at any given point in time and should not affect the timing of family formation. I use the Survey of Consumer Finances to show that the amount of student borrowing is negatively related to the probability of marriage, but the strength of this relationship diminishes with age. I use exogenous variations in the availability of student loans since the 1970s to address the endogeneity of student debt. I supplement my results with data from a panel survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test. Data on reported marriage expectations suggest that Master of Business Administration students who borrow for their education may not have perfect foresight.

Keywords: Student Loans; Credit Constraints; Timing of Marriage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 H52 I23 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2011-09-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://bryan.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/11-141.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:ris:uncgec:2011_014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics UNC Greensboro, Department of Economics, PO Box 26170, Bryan Building 462, Greensboro, NC 27402. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Link ().