The Price of Virtue

Margaret F Brinig and F H Buckley

Public Choice, 1999, vol. 98, issue 1-2, 29 pages

Abstract: This article offers new evidence on the determinants of U.S. unwed birth rates from 1981 to 1990. The authors show that illegitimacy rates are positively and significantly correlated with payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program over a period in which real AFDC payments declined. They attribute this result to a decline in the social sanctions for illegitimacy. Because social sanctions declined, so did the cost of deviance, as well as the price for which unwed women sold their virtue. Copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1999
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