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Socioeconomic Variation in the Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage and Nonmarital Fertility in the United States: Evidence From the Great Recession

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Demography

Abstract

The United States has become increasingly characterized by stark class divides in family structure. Poor women are less likely to marry than their more affluent counterparts but are far more likely to have a birth outside of marriage. Recent theoretical and qualitative work at the intersection of demography and cultural sociology suggests that these patterns are generated because poor women have high, nearly unattainable, economic standards for marriage but make a much weaker connection between economic standing and fertility decisions. We use the events of the Great Recession, leveraging variation in the severity of the crisis between years and across states, to examine how exposure to worse state-level economic conditions is related to poor women’s likelihood of marriage and of having a nonmarital birth between 2008 and 2012. In accord with theory, we find that women of low socioeconomic status (SES) exposed to worse economic conditions are indeed somewhat less likely to marry. However, we also find that unmarried low-SES women exposed to worse economic conditions significantly reduce their fertility; economic standing is not disconnected from nonmarital fertility. Our results suggest that economic concerns were connected to fertility decisions for low-SES unmarried women during the Great Recession.

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Notes

  1. We primarily focus on unmarried women with no more than a high school diploma. Among these women ages 19–44, 13 % reported still being in school. Among unmarried women ages 19–44 with at least a high school diploma, 39 % reported being in school (with 77.5 % working toward an undergraduate degree and 22.5 % working toward a graduate degree).

  2. In 2012, there were problems in the collection of data on women who gave birth in the past 12 months in 59 of the ACS Public Use Microdata Areas, leading to the suppression of 0.5 % of the data. We omit affected cases from the analysis of both fertility and marriage.

  3. We also assess whether our results hold when the models are estimated separately for non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Hispanics. Within the Hispanic subgroup, we also separately examine women who migrated from abroad and native-born Hispanics. In each case, we observe significant and similar negative relationships between unemployment and nonmarital fertility among women with a high school diploma or less. We also find similar negative relationships with marriage, although the coefficient on unemployment for non-Hispanic black women is not significant.

  4. We do not limit our analysis sample using exactly the same criteria as Edin and Kefalas (2005). Edin and Kefalas (2005) limited their sample to women who have had a nonmarital birth (and generally focus on those who have had a teen birth), but it is difficult to identify women based on those characteristics in the ACS. One of our robustness tests—estimating the effect of state-level unemployment on higher-parity births among low-SES unmarried women—comes somewhat closer. Here, if we assume that women having a higher-parity nonmarital birth also had a nonmarital first birth, we successfully parallel the qualitative work in conditioning on a prior nonmarital birth. When we do this, we do find a smaller effect of economic conditions on nonmarital fertility, although it is still negative and significant. It is also important to bear in mind that this is a model of higher-order births, whereas the qualitative research considered many retrospective reports of first births.

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Acknowledgments

Schneider thanks the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for financial support. The authors are grateful to Joshua Goldstein, Kristen Harknett, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Andrew Kelly, and Sara McLanahan as well as seminar participants at UC Berkeley and Stanford for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. A previous version of this article was presented at the American Sociological Association in 2014.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Daniel Schneider & Orestes P. Hastings

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  1. Daniel Schneider
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Correspondence to Daniel Schneider.

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Schneider, D., Hastings, O.P. Socioeconomic Variation in the Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage and Nonmarital Fertility in the United States: Evidence From the Great Recession. Demography 52, 1893–1915 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0437-7

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