The Normativity of Marriage and the Marriage Premium for Children’s Outcomes

Abstract

Children born to married parents have better health, behavioral, educational, and economic outcomes than children of unmarried mothers. This association, known as the "marriage premium," has been interpreted as emerging from the selectivity of parents who marry and from a positive effect of marriage. The authors suggest that the positive effect of marriage could be contextual, emerging from the normativity of marriage in society. They test this hypothesis using the case of Chile, where marital fertility dropped sharply from 66% of all births in 1990 to 27% in 2016.The authors find that the benefit of marriage for infant health was large in the early 1990s but declined as marital fertility became less normative in society, to fully disappear in 2016. Multivariate analysis of temporal variation, multilevel models of variation across place, sibling fixed effects models, and a falsification test consistently indicate that marriage has a beneficial effect when marital fertility is normative and a weak effect when is not. Generalizing from this case, the authors discuss contextual effects of diverse practices and statuses.

The Stability of Co-residential Partnerships after First Birth: Did the 'Protective Effect of Marriage' Increase after 1989?

“…V sociologické i demografické literatuře panuje široká shoda na tom, že pro dítě je -za jinak stejných podmínek -výhodnější, pokud vyrůstá v manželské rodině svých biologických rodičů [McLanahan, Sawhill 2015;Ribar 2015;Torche, Abufhele 2021]. Manželská rodina je -přinejmenším v průměru za celou populaci -pro dítě vhodnější než rodina kohabitujících rodičů [Manning 2015;Popenoe 2009] i než rodina rekonstituovaná (např.…”

“…Negativní vliv kohabitace přetrvává, i pokud jsou ve vztahu děti [Manning 2015;Popenoe 2009;Žilinčíková 2017;Zartler 2021]. Často se proto v literatuře mluví o "ochranném efektu manželství" nebo o "manželské prémii" [Craigie, Brooks-Gunn, Waldfogel 2012;Kearney, Levine 2017;Torche, Abufhele 2021]. Dále bylo opakovaně zjištěno, že manželství, kterým předcházelo nesezdané soužití, jsou méně stabilní než manželství přímá [Axinn, Thornton 1992;Lillard, Brien, Waite 1995;Liefbrer, Dourleijn 2006;Jose, O'Leary, Moyer 2010].…”

Scars from a Previous Epidemic: Social Proximity to Zika and Fertility Intentions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Fertility attitudes encompass one’s thinking about others’ fertility through normative ideas about broader societal expectations and values around childbearing. Normative ideas about childbearing can be encoded through prescriptive norms, or expectations of appropriate behaviors that convey “what individuals should do” (Bicchieri 2005; Horne and Mollborn 2020; Riley et al 2021; Shakya, Weeks, and Christakis 2019), and through descriptive norms, which emerge from the prevalence of individual or collective behaviors in a defined geographical location (i.e., what individuals actually do; Bernardi 2013; Horne and Mollborn 2020; Torche and Abufhele 2021). Thus, although related to fertility intentions, fertility attitudes differ from intentions in that attitudes are subjective norms that guide intentions and behaviors through positive or negative evaluations of performing the behavior (Ajzen 1991) and intentions refer to conscious (Fishbein and Ajzen 2010) and unconscious (Bachrach and Morgan 2013) commitments to perform an action.…”

Beyond early motherhood: Trends and determinants of late fertility in Chile

“…The fertility contribution of women aged 15-19 and 20-24 years has decreased, respectively, from 12.3% to 6.7% and from 28.8% to 19.7%, while the fertility contribution of women aged 30-34 and 35-39 years has increased, respectively, from 18% to 26.2% and from 10.2% to 17.2% (INE, 2018a(INE, , 2021. In recent years, there has also been a rise in childlessness characterized by the 35% increase of women of childbearing age with no children in the last two decades (INE, 2018b) as well as a sharp drop in marital fertility from 66% of all births in 1990 to 27% in 2016 (Torche and Abufhele, 2021).…”