Abortion, Contraception and the Rise in Non-Marital Births: A Revision and Reinterpretation of the Akerlof-Yellen-Katz Model of Pre-Marital Sex and Men¿s Responsibilities

Saul Hoffman ()

No 15-02, Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics

Abstract: In a well-known and widely-cited paper, Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz (1996) proposed a novel and counter-intuitive explanation for the rise of non-marital births in the U.S. that emphasized the way in which improved birth control and legalized abortion altered social norms about the responsibility of men to their unmarried partner¿s pregnancy. Despite the authors¿ own policy recommendations, the paper is regularly cited by social conservatives to show that measures to restrict sex education and access to contraception and abortion are based on respected social science research. I argue that this use of the paper¿s findings stems from what were, in retrospect, unfortunate modeling assumptions about ¿types¿ of women and their motivations concerning pregnancy. I then show that a modest reformulation of their model, based on far more reasonable ¿types,¿ generates precisely the same results, but with radically different policy implications.

Keywords: Non-marital birth; contraception; abortion; AKerlof (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2015
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