Composition and decomposition in nonmarital fertility

Ermisch (2009) criticized Gray, Stockard, and Stone (2006), arguing that they incorrectly tested a model positing a nonlinear relationship between the nonmarital fertility ratio and the proportion of unmarried women. I identify a different problem, which is that even if this model were to hold for a particular population, it would not in general hold for subgroups of this population; likewise, were it to hold for subgroups, it would not hold for aggregations of these subgroups.     

Business cycles and fertility dynamics in the United States

Using recent developments in time-series econometrics, this paper investigates the behavior of fertility over the business cycle. The sex-specific unemployment rates, the divorce rate and the fertility rate are shown to be governed by stochastic trends. Furthermore, fertility is determined to be cointegrated with the divorce rate.In the bivariate vector-autoregressions between fertility and unemployment, an increase in the female or male unemployment rates generate a decrease in fertility, which is consistent with the findings of previous time-series research concerning the procyclical behavior of fertility. However, when the models include the divorce rate and the proportion of young marriages as additional regressors, shocks to the unemployment rates bring about an increase in fertility, implying the countercyclicality of fertility. This outcome holds for the time period 1948–1982, as well as 1972–1982.I would like to thank Clive Granger, Michael Grossman, Theodore Joyce, Salih Neftei, Jeffrey Zax and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any errors reflect my shortcomings only. This paper is the revised version of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 3177. It has not undergone the review accorded official NBER publications; in particular, it has not been submitted for approval by the Board of Directors.     

Cointegration modeling of fertility in the United States

This paper presents estimates of a multiple time series model of fertility, female labor force participation, women's wages, and the relative cohort size of younger to older adult males. Cointegration methods permit modeling of these nonstationary variables, yielding estimates of the long-run relation among the variables, and the dynamic response of each variable to displacements from the steady state. The estimated steady state relation between fertility and the other variables is consistent with economic models of fertility, with fertility negatively related to female wages and male relative cohort size. Fertility responds to cohort size in a manner that is consistent with Easterlin's relative income model of household behavior. Finally, both female labor market variables adjust significantly to departures from the steady state relation, implying that they cannot be treated as exogenous in time series models of fertility.     

Religion and fertility in the United States: New patterns

In the United States, the baby boom-era pattern of high Catholic and low Protestant fertility has ended. Among non-Hispanic whites in the 1980s, Catholic total fertility rates (TFRs) were about one-quarter of a child lower than Protestant rates (1.64 vs. 1.91). Most of the Protestant-Catholic difference is related to later and less frequent marriage among Catholics. Future research on the demography of religious groups should focus on explaining the delayed marriage pattern of Catholics, the high fertility of Mormons and frequently attending Protestants, and the very low fertility of those with no religious affiliation.     

Regional-sub-cultural explanations of black fertility in the United States

Summary This paper re-examines the relevance of the hypothesis concerning the Southern sub-culture and black fertility in the United States. According to zero-order correlation analysis, Southern-born blacks show higher fertility than those born in other regions. But a dummy-variable regression technique applied to the data from the 1970 public-use sample indicates that the Southern origin - independent of other factors-is not different from other regions. Southern birth has the effect of increasing black fertility, but much less so than birth in the North Central region. Southern blacks show higher fertility because of their lower socio-economic background. It is concluded that geographical regions in the United States have little or no cultural meaning in explaining reproductive behaviour.     

Nonmarital cohabitation and fertility in the United States and Western Europe

The increasing popularity of nonmarital cohabitation and a decline in marriage rates in the United States and Western Europe has led to a growing research interest in cohabitation without marriage and its relationship to traditional marriage. This article examines the evidence on the prevalence of cohabitation and the characteristics of cohabitants, and focuses on the childbearing behavior of cohabiting couples who are not married. The evidence to date suggests that in Denmark and Sweden cohabitation is widespread, especially among young people, and childbearing within cohabitational unions is relatively common. In the rest of Western Europe and in the United States, cohabitation is less common and fertility is less frequent. Fertility will be affected to the extent that couples delay having children until they are married. Policy and law concerning cohabitants and their children are changing rapidly. Most of these changes have resulted in a blurring of the distinctions between married and unmarried couples and between legitimate and illegitimate children.     

The economic explanation of fertility changes in the United States

Abstract It is widely assumed that fertility varies positively with economic conditions. Actually this assumption receives little support from the historical record. For a century before 1930 fertility declined while the economy expanded and real incomes rose. Then for nearly three decades fertility and incomes fell and rose together. Since 1960 they have again moved in opposite directions. Clearly, no simple generalization about their relation will hold water. More sophisticated explanations are based on relative rather than absolute incomes. Banks suggested that the downturn in English fertility in the 1870's might have occurred because standards of middle-class consumption rose faster than middle-class incomes, but he found the evidence inconclusive. To reconcile the post-war baby boom in the United States with earlier experience, Easterlin has argued that fertility is determined by the relationship between the income of couples in their twenties and the income of their parents ten to fifteen years earlier. Among the weaknesses of this theory as applied to U.S. experience are its failure to explain the sharp drop in fertility, including that of native white urban women, in the 1920's; the fact that fertility rose most in the baby boom at the higher socio-economic levels where incomes rose least; and the sharp decline of fertility after 1962 in spite of the favourable trend of incomes, including those of younger people. The broad conclusion is that while couples no doubt do consider income, employment opportunities, etc. in deciding how many children to have, such considerations have had a relatively minor influence on changes in fertility, which for the most part have been the result of changes in attitudes. Even the post-war baby boom was a result not only of higher incomes and full employment but also of a shift in attitudes toward family size, particularly among the better-educated, economically better-off sections of society.     

Language usage and fertility in the Mexican-origin population of the United States

This article examines the effects of English proficiency and female education on cumulative and recent fertility within the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. To ascertain whether the cultural or the human capital aspects of linguistic variables have the greater salience for fertility behavior, fertility patterns of bilingual women are compared with those of monolingual women speaking English or Spanish. Using the 1980 U.S. Census 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample for ever-married Mexican-origin women aged 15-44, we find that for almost all age cohorts, the effects of English proficiency are negative and increase with rising education. The strength of the interaction is greater in younger age groups. Greater English proficiency is also associated with a more negative impact of education for native- than foreign-born women. Overall, the influence of "opportunity cost," as opposed to cultural factors, is more important in shaping the fertility behavior of these women.     

Interracial Marriage and Self-Reported Health of Whites and Blacks in the United States

This study examines the self-reported health of 180,291 married non-Hispanic blacks and whites in interracial versus endogamous marriages. Data are from the National Health Interview Survey pooled over the period 1997–2013. The results from ordinal logistic regressions show that non-Hispanic whites intermarried with non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites intermarried with non-Hispanic other races, and non-Hispanic white women with Hispanic husbands report significantly poorer health than their endogamous counterparts. Furthermore, non-Hispanic whites with non-Hispanic black spouses also fare worse than their interracially married peers with Hispanic spouses. In contrast, the self-reported health of married non-Hispanic blacks shows no significant difference between the interracially and the endogamously married. Our findings highlight the theoretical significance of spousal characteristics and couple-level contexts in the household production of health.     

The fertility contribution of Mexican immigration to the United States

Crucial to the long-term contribution of immigration to a receiving country's population is the extent to which the immigrants reproduce themselves in subsequent, native-born generations. Using conventional projection methodologies, this fertility contribution may be poorly estimated primarily because of problems in projecting the number of immigrants who are at risk of childbearing. We propose an alternative method that obviates the need to project the number of immigrants by using the full sending-country birth cohort as the risk group to project their receiving-country childbearing. This "sending-country birth cohort" method is found to perform dramatically better than conventional methods when projecting to 1999 from base years both before and after the large increase in inflows of Mexican immigrants to the United States in the late 1980s. Projecting forward from 1999, we estimate a cumulative contribution of Mexican immigrant fertility from the 1980s to 2040 of 36 million births, including 25% to 50% more births after 1995 than are projected using conventional methods.     

The Benefits from Marriage and Religion in the United States: A Comparative Analysis

In the United States, married people have better outcomes on a variety of measures of wellbeing than do single persons. People who participate in religious activities show similar advantages relative to those who have no religious involvement. This article présents a comparative analysis of these two social institutions: marriage and religion. A critical review of the literature on how religious involvement and being married affect a range of child and adult outcomes provides evidence of generally positive effects. Religion and marriage have an impact on many of the same domains of life, and there are remarkable similarities in the mechanisms through which they exert an influence.     

Agricultural Opportunity and Marriage: The United States at the Turn of the Century

This article focuses on the marriage behavior of rural white males in the United States at the turn of the century. The principal goal of the analysis is to assess the role of agricultural opportunity in determining nuptial timing and prevalence. The major issue addressed is whether restricted opportunity in farming retarded entry into marriage. Overall, the findings suggest that rural young men were less likely to enter marriage when local opportunity in agriculture was poor. One mechanism through which the local opportunity structure influenced nuptiality was occupational choice. Young men who entered nonagricultural pursuits or who were employed as farm laborers were far less likely to have married than young men who became farmers.     

Parity-specific fertility intentions and uncertainty: the United States, 1970 to 1976

A theoretical and analytic model of fertility intentions is proposed which treats “don’t know” responses and other uncertain responses as distinct from more firm intentions. Methodologically, these analyses show that “don’t know” responses need not be treated as missing data, but instead are both valid and meaningful responses. Furthermore, eliminating these uncertain respondents would have the negative effects of distorting across survey comparisons in intentions due to shifts in aggregate uncertainty, reducing the likelihood of accurately detecting shifts in fertility intentions, and lessening the representatives of the sample analyzed. Substantively, in conjunction with Morgan (1981), these results show that the sharp 1965–76 decline in the likelihood of intending more births at parities 2 through 5 occurred as women halted childbearing at minimal acceptable levels and postponed further childbearing. With time (or age), this delayed fertility became fertility about which the respondent was uncertain and, finally, fertility foregone. Since 1970, similar shifts are observed at parities 0 and 1, perhaps foreshadowing an increase in voluntary childlessness and one-child families.     

Effect on unwanted fertility of extending physician-administered birth control in the United States

A goal of publicly subsidized family planning programs in the United States is to prevent unwanted births, and the primary means being used to achieve this goal is to increase coverage with physician-administered contraception, with priority being given to persons from low-income families. We analyzed data from families living in low-income neighborhoods to determine whether that means would contribute to that goal, and if so, how much unwanted fertility might be decreased through increased coverage with physician-administered methods.The results indicate that increased coverage with those methods would decrease unwanted fertility by 80 percent (79 percent among blacks, 83 percent among whites). Increasing the ratio of sterilization to pill and IUD makes the effect of the increased coverage even more dramatic.     

Cohort estimates of nonmarital fertility for U.S. Women

Historical trends in U.S. nonmarital fertility have been compiled almost exclusively from vital statistics on births. This paper complements this historical record by providing cohort estimates of nonmarital fertility for cohorts of U.S. women spanning approximately 50 years of cohort experience. Life table estimates using retrospective marital and fertility histories in the June 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 Current Population Surveys reveal nonnegligible levels of nonmarital fertility historically. For women born between 1925 and 1929, nearly 1 in 10 had at least one nonmarital birth by age 30. For women born between 1965 and 1969, more than 1 of 4 had one or more nonmarital births by age 30, with roughly 1 of5 white, 3 of 5 black, and 1 in 3 Hispanic women having at least one nonmarital birth by age 30. Life table estimates reveal a twofold increase between ages 20 and 30 in the percentage of women with at least one child outside of formal marriage for all cohorts of white and Hispanic women, and an increase of roughly two-thirds for all cohorts of black women. I also document qualitative differences in nonmarital fertility by race/ethnicity, with the percentage of nonmarital births following a divorce or marital separation for white women approximately twice that for black or Hispanic women. Finally, I introduce a new measure, the cohort nonmarital fertility ratio (CNMFR), which provides a cohort complement to the standard period nonmarital fertility ratio. Conservative estimates reveal a roughly threefold increase in the CNMFR for women born from 1925-1929 to 1950-1954 for both whites and blacks, despite substantially higher levels of nonmarital fertility among black women. Overall, these findings reveal surprisingly high levels of nonmarital fertility for women born since the 1920s and confirm that nonmarital fertility has become an increasingly substantial component of overall U.S. fertility.     

The Death of Marriage? The Effects of New Forms of Legal Recognition on Marriage Rates in the United States

Some conservative groups argue that allowing same-sex couples to marry reduces the value of marriage to opposite-sex couples. This article examines how changes in U.S. legal recognition laws occurring between 1995 and 2010 designed to include same-sex couples have altered marriage rates in the United States. Using a difference-in-differences strategy that compares how marriage rates change after legal recognition in U.S. states that alter legal recognition versus states that do not, I find no evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry reduces the opposite-sex marriage rate. Although the opposite-sex marriage rate is unaffected by same-sex couples marrying, it decreases when domestic partnerships are available to opposite-sex couples.     

Religion and fertility in the United States: The importance of marriage patterns and hispanic origin

The marital fertility of white Catholic wives in the United States was higher than that of non-Catholic wives in 1977–1981, but when Hispanics were excluded, the differential disappeared; therefore, the Catholic-non-Catholic differential in recent years was due entirely to the higher fertility of Hispanic Catholics. The Total Fertility Rates (TFR) of Catholics were slightly lower in 1977–1981 than those for white Protestants, primarily because Catholic women tend to marry later than Protestant women. This finding was confirmed by multivariate analysis of data on children ever born. We examine some additional data and various theories to speculate on whether these patterns will last.