Do Children Stabilize Danish Marriages?

Michael Svarer and Mette Verner ()

No 2004-16, CAM Working Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics

Abstract: In this paper we study the relationship between fertility behavior and the process of marriage duration. The potential endogeneity of fertility on marriage behavior is taken into account by modeling fertility and divorce jointly. We apply the ”timing-of-event” method (Abbring & van den Berg (2003)) to identify the causal effect of births on the divorce hazard. We show that couples who are less prone to divorce are more prone to invest in children, and therefore one might (mistakenly) conclude that children tend to stabilize marriages. However, when correcting for this selectivity bias arising from the fertility decision, we conclude that children themselves do not have a positive effect on marriage duration

Keywords: marriage; divorce; children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C3 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2004-10
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuieca:2004_16

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