Marriage and Union Formation in the United States: Recent Trends Across Racial Groups and Economic Backgrounds
AbstractFamily formation in the United States has changed dramatically: marriage has become less common, nonmarital cohabitation has become more common, and racial and economic inequalities in these experiences have increased. We provide insights into recent U.S. trends by presenting cohort estimates for people born between 1970 and 1997, who began forming unions between 1985 and 2015. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, we find that typical ages at marriage and union formation increased faster across these recent cohorts than across cohorts born between 1940 and 1969. As fewer people married at young ages, more coh...
Source: Demography - September 9, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
What Factors Explain the Decline in Widowed Women ’s Poverty?
AbstractHistorically, women in widowhood in the United States have been vulnerable, with high rates of poverty. However, over the past several decades, their poverty rate has fallen considerably. In this article, we look at why this decline occurred and whether it will continue. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to Social Security administrative earnings and benefit records, we address these questions by exploring three factors that could have contributed to this decline: (1) women ’s rising levels of education; (2) their increased attachment to the labor force; and (3) increasing marital selection, ...
Source: Demography - September 9, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Direct Effects of Legal Same-Sex Marriage in the United States: Evidence From Massachusetts
AbstractI provide evidence on the direct effects of legal same-sex marriage in the United States by studying Massachusetts, the first state to legalize it in 2004 by court order. Using confidential Massachusetts data from 2001 –2013, I show that the ruling significantly increased marriage among lesbians, bisexual women, and gay men compared with the associated change for heterosexuals. I find no significant effects on coupling. Marriage take-up effects are larger for lesbians than for bisexual women or gay men and are l arger for households with children than for households without children. Consistent with prior work in...
Source: Demography - September 7, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
How Does Deprivation Affect Early-Age Mortality? Patterns of Socioeconomic Determinants of Neonatal and Posteonatal Mortality in Bolivia
This study helps identify crucial sectors of development related to living standards and deprivation inequality in order to tackle neonatal and postneonatal mortality. (Source: Demography)
Source: Demography - September 7, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Dynamics of Intimate Relationships and Contraceptive Use During Early Emerging Adulthood
AbstractWe investigate the immediate social context of contraceptive behaviors: specifically, the intimate relationship. We use the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study (2008 –2012), based on a random sample of 1,003 women ages 18–19 residing in a Michigan county. Women were interviewed weekly for 2.5 years, resulting in an age range of 18–22. We test three sets of hypotheses about change over time within a relationship, using relationship-level within-between mode ls, which compare a couple’s contraceptive behaviors across different times in the relationship. First, we find that a couple is less like...
Source: Demography - September 7, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Tapped Out? Racial Disparities in Extrahousehold Kin Resources and the Loss of Homeownership
AbstractResearch shows that extrahousehold kin economic resources contribute to the racial gap in transitions into homeownership, but the extent to which these resources matter for racial disparities in exits from homeownership is less understood. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1984 –2017, we examine the role of extrahousehold kin wealth and poverty in shaping racial inequalities in the risk of exiting homeownership. Our nonlinear decomposition results indicate that racial differences in family network resources explain a nontrivial portion of the racial gap in homeownership exit, but th...
Source: Demography - September 7, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Brazil ’s Missing Infants: Zika Risk Changes Reproductive Behavior
AbstractZika virus epidemics have potential large-scale population effects. Controlled studies of mice and nonhuman primates indicate that Zika affects fecundity, raising concerns about miscarriage in human populations. In regions of Brazil, Zika risk peaked months before residents learned about the epidemic and its relation to congenital anomalies. This spatiotemporal variation supports analysis of both biological effects of Zika infection on fertility and the effects of learning about Zika risk on reproductive behavior. Causal inference techniques used with vital statistics indicate that the epidemic caused reductions in...
Source: Demography - August 31, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Metropolitan Reclassification and the Urbanization of Rural America
AbstractWe highlight the paradoxical implications of decadal reclassification of U.S. counties (and America ’s population) from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan status between 1960 and 2017. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we show that the reclassification of U.S. counties has been a significant engine of metropolitan growth and nonmetropolitan decline. Over the study period, 753—or nearly 25% of all nonmetropolitan counties—were redefined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as metropolitan, shifting nearly 70 million residents from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan America by 2017. All the growth since...
Source: Demography - August 30, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Social Significance of Interracial Cohabitation: Inferences Based on Fertility Behavior
AbstractInterracial couples cohabit at higher rates than same-race couples, which is attributed to lower barriers to interracial cohabitation relative to intermarriage. This begs the question of whether the significance of cohabitation differs between interracial and same-race couples. Using data from the 2006 –2017 National Survey of Family Growth, we assessed the meaning of interracial cohabitation by comparing the pregnancy risk, pregnancy intentions, and union transitions following a pregnancy among women in interracial and same-race cohabitations. The pregnancy and union transition behaviors of wom en in White-Black...
Source: Demography - August 30, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Early Determinants of Work Disability in an International Perspective
This study explores the interrelated roles of health and welfare state policies in the decision to take up disability insurance (DI) benefits due to work disability (WD), defined as the (partial) inability to engage in gainful employment as a result of physical or mental illness. We exploit the large international variation of health, self-reported WD, and the uptake of DI benefits in the United States and Europe using a harmonized data set with life history information assembled from SHARE, ELSA, and HRS. We find that the mismatch between WD and DI benefit receipt varies greatly across countries. Objective health explains...
Source: Demography - August 24, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Wealth of Parents: Trends Over Time in Assortative Mating Based on Parental Wealth
This article describes trends in parental wealth homogamy among union cohorts formed between 1987 and 2013 in Denmark. Using high-quality register data on the wealth of parents during the year of partnering, we show that the correlation between partners ’ levels of parental wealth is considerably lower compared with estimates from research on other countries. Nonetheless, parental wealth homogamy is high at the very top of the parental wealth distribution, and individuals from wealthy families are relatively unlikely to partner with individuals f rom families with low wealth. Parental wealth correlations among partners a...
Source: Demography - August 23, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
The Direct Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Changes in the U.S. Income Distribution, 1967 –2015
AbstractScholars have increasingly drawn attention to rising levels of income inequality in the United States. However, prior studies have provided an incomplete account of how changes to specific transfer programs have contributed to changes in income growth across the distribution. Our study decomposes the direct effects of tax and transfer programs on changes in the household income distribution from 1967 to 2015. We show that despite a rising Gini coefficient, lower-tail inequality (the ratio of the 50th to 10th percentile)declined in the United States during this period due to the rise of in-kind and tax-based transfe...
Source: Demography - August 23, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Educational Reproduction in Germany: A Prospective Study Based on Retrospective Data
This study examines educational reproduction of East and West German men and women born between 1930 and 1950. In a prospective design, we study the importance of mobility and fertility pathways of reproduction, considering not only the social reproduction of education as an attribute but also the demographic reproduction of individuals who carry this attribute. Using data from NEPS and SOEP, we introduce a method that estimates prospective models based on retrospective data commonly available in surveys. The analysis offers new estimates of the expected number of high- and low-educated children born to men and women of di...
Source: Demography - August 16, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Household Composition and Gender Differences in Parental Time Investments
This article provides empirical evidence that parental time investments, defined as the amount of time that parents spend participating in activities with their child, change differentially by child gender following a transition from a two-parent to single-mother household. Boys experience larger investment reductions following the change in household structure, which may help facilitate previously documented gender gaps in noncognitive skills for those in single-mother households. Boys lose an estimated additional 3.8 hours per week in fathers ’ time investments, nearly 30% of average weekly paternal investments across ...
Source: Demography - August 13, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
Interdependencies in Mothers ’ and Daughters’ Work-Family Life Course Trajectories: Similar but Different?
AbstractWomen ’s life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands su ggest enduring within-family reproduction of women’s family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit this issue by studying two complementary types of intergenerational associations in women’s combined work-family trajectories. On the one hand, we examine similarities across mothers’ and daughte rs’ work-fam...
Source: Demography - August 10, 2020 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research
