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Title: The Influence of Nonmarital Childbearing on the Formation of First Marriages
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Bennett, Neil G. Bloom, David E. Miller, Cynthia K. |
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The Influence of Nonmarital Childbearing on the Formation of First Marriages NBER Working Paper No. 4564, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1993. Also: http://nber.nber.org/papers/W4564 Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Childbearing; Cohabitation; Coresidence; Fertility; Marriage; Modeling, Hazard/Event History/Survival/Duration; Welfare; Work Knowledge This paper examines the association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage and documents a negative association between these variables--controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences--in several large survey data sets for the United States. The paper then subjects possible explanations of this finding to empirical test. The analyses performed support the following conclusions: Nonmarital childbearing does not appear to be driven by low expectations of future marriage. Rather, nonmarital childbearing tends to be an unexpected and unwanted event that has multiple effects, which on balance are negative, on a woman's subsequent likelihood of first marriage. Nonmarital childbearers are more likely to enter informal cohabitational unions than are their single counterparts who do not bear a child. Evidence is found that the negative association between out-of-wedlock childbearing and subsequent marriage is particularly strong among welfare recipients as well as evidence that out-of-wedlock childbearing increases the likelihood that a woman marries her child's biological father. On the other hand, we find no evidence that (a) stigma associated with nonmarital childbearing plays an important role in this process or (b) the demands of children reduce the time that unmarried mothers have to devote to marriage market activities. |
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Bibliography Citation
Bennett, Neil G., David E. Bloom and Cynthia K. Miller. "The Influence of Nonmarital Childbearing on the Formation of First Marriages." NBER Working Paper No. 4564, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1993. |