Does Marriage Matter for Children? Assessing the Impact of Legal Marriage in Sweden

Anders Bjorklund, Donna Ginther and Marianne Sundström ()

No 3/2010, Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow’s Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to identify the effect of marriage and the effect of selection bias on marriage estimates. Sweden’s rich administrative data sources enable us to identify the children who were affected by parental marriage due to this marriage boom. Our analysis addresses the question of whether marginal marriages created by a policy initiative have an impact on children. Using grade point average at age 16 as the outcome variable, we first show the expected pattern that children with married parents do better than children with cohabiting parents. However, once we control for observable family background and compare the outcomes for children whose parents married due to the reform with those for children whose parents remained unmarried, the differences largely disappear. The results from a sibling difference analysis are consistent with the conclusion that the differentials among children of married and cohabiting parents reflect selection rather than causation.

Keywords: family structure; marriage; child well-being; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 J12 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2010-03-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sofi.su.se/content/1/c6/03/09/74/WP10no3.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.sofi.su.se/content/1/c6/03/09/74/WP10no3.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.sofi.su.se/content/1/c6/03/09/74/WP10no3.pdf)

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:hhs:sofiwp:2010_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniel Rossetti ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).