We investigated the sensitivity of measures of cognitive ability and socioemotional development to changes in parents' marital status using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979. We used several scores for each assessment, taken at different times relative to parents' marital transitions, which allowed us to trace the effects starting up to five years before a parent's change in marital status and continuing for up to six years afterward. It also allowed us to correct for the unobserved heterogeneity of the transition and nontransition samples by controlling for the child's fixed effect in estimating the time path of his or her response to the transition. We found that children from families with both biological parents scored significantly better on the BPI and the PIAT-math and PIAT-reading assessments than did children from nonintact families. However, much of the difference disappeared when we controlled for background variables. Furthermore, when we controlled for child fixed effects, we did not find significant longitudinal variation in these scores over long periods that encompass the marital transition. This finding suggests that most of the variation is due to cross-sectional differences and is not a result of marital transitions per se.

In particular, the study focuses on differences in marriage and divorce patterns by educational attainment and by age at marriage. This work is descriptive and does not attempt to explain causation or why marriage patterns differ across groups.About 85 percent of the NLSY79 cohort married by age 46, and among those who married, a sizeable fraction, almost 30 percent, married more than once. The bulk of marriages occurred by age 28, with relatively few marriages taking place at age 35 or older. Approximately 42 percent of marriages that took place between ages 15 and 46 ended in divorce by age 46. In the NLSY79, women in this cohort were more likely to marry and to

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