The Effect of Children's Gender on Living Arrangements and Child Support

Mammen, Kristin

doi:10.1257/aer.98.2.408

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Research by sociologists (Spanier and Glick 1981;Morgan et al 1988) and economists (Ananat and Michaels 2008;Bedard and Deschênes 2005;Dahl and Moretti 2008;Mammen 2008) has found that U.S. couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons. The results seem to complement evidence from developing countries that preferences for sons alter family behaviour (e.g., Arnold 1997;Ben-Porath and Welch 1976;Das Gupta et al 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teenage Daughters as a Cause of Divorce

Kabátek

Ribar

2017

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In our paper, we are analysing the link between gender of children and the divorce risks faced by the parents. In other words, we ask whet her parents of girls divorce more often than parents of boys.This question has received considerable attention in the academ ic literature. Several American studies have found that families with first-born girls are slightly more likely to divorce than families with first-born boys. Other American studies have however challenged this finding, and there is no evidence from other developed countries showing that such a relationship exists. Thus, the quest ion remains largely unanswered.In our paper, we leverage the Dutch administrative data to overcome major limitations of the previous studies, and we show that there is indeed a link between the child's gender and the divorce risks faced by the parents: The Dutch families with daughters are more likely to divorce than families with sons. This relationship however does not hold universally. Up to the age of 12, the gender of a child has no influence over the parents' divorce risks. It is only when the children become teenagers that the parents of girls start to face higher risks of divorce. We find that throughout the teenage years, parents of first-born girls face 5% higher risks of divorce than parents of first-born boys. This effect peaks at the age of 15, when the risks faced by parents of girls become almost 10% higher than the risks faced by parents of similarly-aged boys. In the following years, the excess risks decline, and eventually disappear when the children turn 19. The same age-specific associations are found among second-and third-born daughters, although the magnitudes of the effect are lower.We show that our results cannot be explained by son preference of Dutch parents, or by a host of other previously-postulated mechanisms such as the non-random assignment of gender to children, or higher financial costs of daughters. Instead, our study suggests that the increased odds of divorce should be attributed to the relationship strains between parents and their teenage daughters. This claim is supported by an analysis of a large survey of Dutch households, which shows that parents with teenage daughters are more likely to disagree about the way their child should be raised, and they report lower satisfaction with their life and the quality of family relationships compared to parents with teenage sons. Teenage daughters themselves tend to report worse relationships with their fathers.Additional analyses of the administrative data emphasize the role of the relationship between the father and his daughter. A particularly interesting result comes from an exercise in which we split the sample into two groups, distinguishing between fathers who grew up with sisters, and fathers who did not. This split yields a contrasting set of results: Fathers who grew up without sisters are subject to a pronounced increase of divorce odds when their daughters become teenagers, whereas the fathers with sisters are not. Remarkably, the fat...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teenage Daughters as a Cause of Divorce

Kabátek

Ribar

2017

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Because marriage is no longer the dominant environment of fertility and child rearing in the United States (Kennedy and Bumpass 2007), it may be worth extending this type of inquiry to outcomes other than divorce. Extending our approach to apply to nonmarital unions or to investigate outcomes other than union stability—including, for example, sex-specific child support payment (Mammen 2008)—may be instructive.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies have reported that unmarried couples with a son enter into marriage more quickly than those with a daughter (Lundberg and Rose 2003), while others have reported no evidence of a difference (Bzostek et al 2012). Especially provocative has been work indicating that sons are more likely than daughters to live with their fathers (Dahl and Moretti 2008; Lundberg and Rose 2003; Mott 1994), in part because couples are more likely to divorce if they have daughters than if they have sons (Ananat and Michaels 2008; Bedard and Deschênes 2005; Dahl and Moretti 2008; Mammen 2008; Morgan et al 1988; Spanier and Glick 1981). …”

Section: Motivation: Sex Preference Gender and Parental Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Provocative studies in economics and sociology, using data from the United States, have reported associations between offspring sex and marital stability (Ananat and Michaels 2008; Bedard and Deschênes 2005; Dahl and Moretti 2008; Mammen 2008; Morgan et al 1988; Spanier and Glick 1981). Several of these studies indicate that marriages producing firstborn daughters are more likely to end in divorce than marriages producing firstborn sons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Empirical social scientists drawing inferences about gender dynamics from the daughter/divorce association have relied on implicit assumptions about dynamics of selection into live birth (Dahl and Moretti 2008; Mammen 2008; Morgan et al 1988; Spanier and Glick 1981). This study explicates some of those assumptions and illustrates the importance of testing their validity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Do Daughters Really Cause Divorce? Stress, Pregnancy, and Family Composition

Hamoudi

Nobles

2014

Demography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Provocative studies have reported that in the United States, marriages producing firstborn daughters are more likely to divorce than those producing firstborn sons. The findings have been interpreted as contemporary evidence of fathers' son preference. Our study explores the potential role of another set of dynamics that may drive these patterns: namely, selection into live birth. Epidemiological evidence indicates that the characteristic female survival advantage may begin before birth. If stress accompanying unstable marriages has biological effects on fecundity, a female survival advantage could generate an association between stability and the sex composition of offspring. Combining regression and simulation techniques to analyze real-world data, we ask, How much of the observed association between sex of the firstborn child and risk of divorce could plausibly be accounted for by the joint effects of female survival advantage and reduced fecundity associated with unstable marriage? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find that relationship conflict predicts the sex of children born after conflict was measured; conflict also predicts subsequent divorce. Conservative specification of parameters linking pregnancy characteristics, selection into live birth, and divorce are sufficient to generate a selection-driven association between offspring sex and divorce, which is consequential in magnitude. Our findings illustrate the value of demographic accounting of processes which occur before birth—a period when many outcomes of central interest in the population sciences begin to take shape.

show abstract

Children’s Gender and Investments from Nonresident Fathers

Mammen

2019

J Fam Econ Iss

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Effect of Children's Gender on Living Arrangements and Child Support

Cited by 26 publications

References 10 publications

Teenage Daughters as a Cause of Divorce

Teenage Daughters as a Cause of Divorce

Do Daughters Really Cause Divorce? Stress, Pregnancy, and Family Composition

Children’s Gender and Investments from Nonresident Fathers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About