Marriage

Based on the results of MDRC's latest evaluation, Career Academies should be getting a lot more attention. As described by MDRC, Career Academies:

Typically serv[e] between 150 and 200 students from grades 9 or 10 through grade 12 [and] are defined by three distinguishing features: (1) they are organized as small learning communities to create a more supportive, personalized learning environment; (2) they combine academic and career and technical curricula around a career theme to enrich teaching and learning; and (3) they establish partnerships with local employers to provide career awareness and work-based learning opportunities for students.

The new MDRC evaluation looks at the relatively long-term--eight years after high-school graduation--results of Career Academies, finding:

• The Career Academies produced sustained earnings gains that averaged 11 percent (or $2,088) more per year for Academy group members than for individuals in the non-Academy group — a $16,704 boost in total earnings over the eight years of follow-up (in 2006 dollars).
• These labor market impacts were concentrated among young men, a group that has experienced a severe decline in real earnings in recent years. Through a combination of increased wages, hours worked, and employment stability, real earnings for young men in the Academy group increased by $3,731 (17 percent) per year — or nearly $30,000 over eight years.
• Overall, the Career Academies served as viable pathways to a range of postsecondary education opportunities, but they do not appear to have been more effective than options available to the non-Academy group. More than 90 percent of both groups graduated from high school or received a General Educational Development (GED) certificate, and half completed a postsecondary credential.
• The Career Academies produced an increase in the percentage of young people living independently with children and a spouse or partner. Young men also experienced positive impacts on marriage and being custodial parents.

The only really disappointing finding is the lack of results for young women. It's not clear from evaluation why women didn't benefit:

.... The evaluation did not find evidence that the Career Academy experience was systematically different for young women than for young men. Nor does it appear that the Career Academies had systematically different impacts on the high school experiences of young women and young men. One hypothesis, however, is that the lack of post-high school labor market impacts for young women may be an artifact of their somewhat shorter and more intermittent employment spells associated with having children or attending postsecondary education programs. This will be explored in nonexperimental analyses to be presented in a future paper.

Although reports have focused on employment and earnings gains for young men, the results on "family formation" are even more striking. Students who attended Career Academies were 13 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than non-attendees. Young men who attended academies were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than male non-attendees.

Some conservative marriage promoters have argued that the correlation between marriage and earnings in the general population is evidence that marriage directly causes higher earnings. The Career Academies evaluation suggests that the casual link moves in the opposite direction, with higher earnings leading to more stable families.

From RAND, a new working paper finds that divorce might not so bad on kids after all.

Social scientists and commentators disagree on how much of the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children’s emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. The author analyzed panel data from the 1986-2002 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and found that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children. However, after controlling for unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time, the effect of parents’ divorce substantially declines and its influence on their children’s emotional well-being is not statistically significant.

Via the Sloan Work and Family Research Network Blog.

Some interesting stuff in this new Kaiser Family Foundation poll:

• During the last five years, one of out every five Americans reports having been contacted by a collection agency because of medical bills. Some 17 percent have used up all or most of their savings and 12 percent have been unable to pay for basic necessities because of medical bills.
• Almost one in five (18 percent) decided to stay in one job, rather than take another, mainly because the job they held at the time offered better health care benefits.
• Asked to name the two issues they would most like to hear presidential candidates talk about, 22 percent named health care as the first issue (it was third after economic issues and Iraq); and 18 percent named it as their second issue. Poverty didn't manage even half a percent as a first or second issue, but was named as a second issue by 1 percent of Democratic registered voters. The budget deficit/national debt was named as a first issue by two percent, and a second issue by one percent.
• More Americans want to hear candidates talk about reducing the costs of health care and health insurance (40 percent) than about expanding health insurance coverage for the uninsured (31 percent), with an even wider gap (46-25) among independent voters.

And my favorite finding: Five percent decided to get married "mainly to have access to their spouse's health care benefits", and another five percent decided to get married so their spouse could have access to their health care benefits.¹ Which got me thinking, this might be a good follow-up to the "married people earn more money" billboards that have been popping up in urban neighborhoods (including mine):

According to a new ad campaign sponsored by the Baltimore-based Campaign for Our Children (CFOC) and apparently funded in part with public dollars, married people "earn more" and have smarter kids. According to CFOC's website:

The campaign’s core message is a practical, added-value approach that can be summed up in just two words: Marriage Works.

....

Using available research – and there’s plenty of it – we explain the benefits of marriage in fact-based, no-nonsense ways that teens and adults can understand and respond to. And as the facts demonstrate, the benefits of marriage are compelling and far-reaching.

With focused, persuasive television and radio commercials, billboards, bus shelter ads and a web presence, Marriage Works drives home the practical benefits of matrimony.

CFOC argues that "research suggests that children do best when two parents who have a healthy marriage raise them." However, their ads drop the "healthy" part in favor of a simplistic "marriage good" message. Moreover, there's no consensus among researchers on whether higher levels of well-being in married families are due to marriage itself or to other unmeasured factors. If it's the latter, marriage promotion efforts could actually reduce child well-being (both directly by encouraging couples to marry who would be better off unmarried, and indirectly, by stigmatizing children of unmarried parents). A new working paper finds evidence to support this less sanguine conclusion:

... [our] estimates suggest that unobserved factors rather than a causal effect drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, at least for the children of women whose marriage decisions are most affected by variation in incarceration rates for men. For Hispanics, in particular, we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.

In their lit review, the authors cite additional recent research suggesting that the impact of marriage on child well-being may vary by socio-economic status.

Another simplistic claim made in the CFOC ads is that "married people earn more." Here, again, recent research suggests things aren't so simple. According to a summary of some of this research by Justin Wolfers:

... Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschenes ... find that divorce actually led women to live in households with greater income per person. ....

And Ananat and Michaels agree, finding similar effects. They then slice and dice this surprising finding, concluding that divorce may raise incomes on average, but it leads some women to lower incomes, and some to higher incomes. Those who gain tend to be in a (slight) minority, but they tend to gain more, which explains the rise in average income.

In short, there is strong evidence that the decisions couples make to dissolve their unions (or not enter into them in the first place) are often beneficial. In the best interests of children, CFOC would be wise to discontinue ads that provide a partial and misleading picture of the evidence on this score.

In her lead essay, Stephanie Coontz reviews the evolution of marriage, and draws these two lessons:

First, marriage is not on the verge of extinction. Most cohabiting couples eventually do get married, either to each other or to someone else. New groups, such as gays and lesbians, are now demanding access to marriage — a demand that many pro-marriage advocates oddly interpret as an attack on the institution. And a well-functioning marriage is still an especially useful and effective method of organizing interpersonal commitments and improving people’s well-being. But in today’s climate of gender equality and personal choice, we must realize that successful marriages require different traits, skills, and behaviors than in the past.

.... Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views.

So there is no reason to give up on building successful marriages — but we won’t do it by giving people outdated advice about gender roles. We may be able to bring the divorce rate down a little further — but since one method of doing that is to get more people to delay marriage, this will probably lead to more cohabitation. We may also be able to reverse last year’s uptick in teen births and return to the downward course of the late 1990s and first few years of the 21st century — but not by teaching abstinence-only to young people who if they do delay marriage are almost certainly going to have sex beforehand.

The second lesson of history is that the time has passed when we can construct our social policies, work schedules, health insurance systems, sex education programs — or even our moral and ethical beliefs about who owes what to whom — on the assumption that all long-term commitments and care-giving obligations should or can be organized through marriage. Of course we must seek ways to make marriage more possible for couples and to strengthen the marriages they contract. But we must be equally concerned to help couples who don’t marry become better co-parents, to help single parents and cohabiting couples meet their obligations, and to teach divorced parents how to minimize their conflicts and improve their parenting.

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfully?” Much recent hysteria to the contrary, we know a lot about how to do that. We should devote more of our energies to getting that research out and less to fantasizing about a return to a mythical Golden Age of marriage of the past.

Also worth reading is Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers essay on Marriage and the Market:

So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let’s be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children. Returning to the language of economics, the key today is consumption complementarities-activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives “hedonic marriage”.

....

Many have cited high and rising divorce rates as pointing to the collapse of the family, and Kay Hymowitz’s essay reprises these themes. Yet the high divorce rates among those marrying in the 1970s reflected a transition, as many married the right partner for the old specialization model of marriage, only to find that pairing hopelessly inadequate in the modern hedonic marriage.

In a recent paper, economist Shirley Liu of the University of Miami investigates the association found by various researchers between parental divorce and children's educational attainments is a causal one, and finds no evidence that divorce per se is the factor that causes reduced educational attainment:

.... Using annual data on a representative sample of children and their families since childbirth until the completion of their schooling, we model child's schooling attainments and parents' marital dissolution as joint decision processes, where unobservables triggering divorce and affecting child development are assumed to be correlated. After accounting for both observed and unobserved characteristics, we find no evidence that the lower educational attainments is attributable to parents' divorce per se, but rather due to unobserved factors that are correlated with divorce. This result is robust to a more general definition of relationship dissolution, by treating spousal separation and divorce both as family "disruptions".

While further research is into the mechanisms through which parents' divorce affects child attainments is needed, our findings provide some evidence that divorce in itself does not negatively affect children's educational outcomes. The reasons for dissolving a marriage tend to be family-specific and usually observed only by the parties involved. Assuming that parents are altruistic and internalize potential gains (and costs) of dissolving their marriage on their children when deciding to divorce, on the margin there may be benefits to divorce (at least for some). If our goal is to help children from divorced families to become self-reliant adults, policy-makers need to be mindful that divorce in itself may be a consequence, rather than a culprit, of the same underlying mechanism that causes the inferior child outcomes. Simply restricting access to divorce without consideration of individual needs and circumstances can be irresponsible; it may also risk jeopardizing the welfare of many families and their children.

In a related paper published last year, Liu and Frank Heiland found that among children born to cohabiting biological parents, those children whose parents marry within a year after childbirth do not display significantly better outcomes than children of parents who continue to cohabit.

Since marriage promotion popped up on the policy agenda in the early years of the Bush administration, there's been a somewhat inexplicable consensus inside the beltway that, certeris paribus, marriage has positive effects on child well-being. Leaping past the question of causation, the only question that has seemed open for debate in policy circles is what kind of "marriage promotion" programs would increase marriage rates and child well-being. (As an example of the Washington Consensus on marriage, see this article). It's time to rethink that consensus. Based on the evidence we have to date, it's way too early to reach any consensus for policy purposes that the marriage/well-being link is a causal one.

In a fascinating new NBER working paper, Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat and Daniel Hungerman find that early access to oral contraception boosted the share of children with mothers who were married, college-educated, and had professional jobs:

In this paper we ask how the diffusion of oral contraception to young unmarried women affected the number and maternal characteristics of children born to these women. Using census data, we find that early pill access led to an increase in the share of children whose mothers were married, college-educated, and had professional occupations. The pill's effects on the average mother are different from the pill's effects on the average woman, and the effects of the pill on maternal characteristics are in some instances different from the effects of abortion. We investigate the mechanisms by which the pill led to these differential effects and find that access to the pill led to falls in short-term fertility rates for young women and led to decreases in lifetime fertility at the intensive and extensive margins. The impacts of the pill on household characteristics are thus associated with retiming of births, changes in the characteristics of potential mothers, changes in which women become mothers, and by reductions in completed family size. Finally, while the pill affected maternal characteristics differently than abortion, we find suggestive results that availability of the pill lowered abortions among young women.

Too bad that providing oral contraception isn't among the allowable uses of this money.

Congrats to Heather Boushey and Todd Tucker on their marriage this weekend. Here's the NYT announcement (unfortunately they don't have pictures in the online version of wedding annoucements):

Heather Marie Boushey and Todd Nathaniel Tucker were married yesterday. The bridegroom’s father, the Rev. Dr. Robert Dale Tucker, a Southern Baptist minister, officiated in a nondenominational ceremony at Cafe Flora in Seattle.

The bride, 37, is keeping her name. She is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, a nonpartisan institute. She graduated from Hampshire College and received a doctorate in economics from the New School for Social Research.

She is a daughter of Bobbi and Michael G. Boushey of Woodinville, Wash. Her father retired as a machinist at Boeing in Everett, Wash. Her mother is a bookkeeper in Lynnwood, Wash.

The bridegroom, 28, is the research director of the global trade watch division of Public Citizen, specializing in the legal, economic and political consequences of trade agreements, including Nafta. He graduated from George Washington University and received a master’s in development studies from Cambridge University in England.

He is a son of Gail Atchison Tucker and Mr. Tucker of Louisville, Ky. His mother is a freelance writer. His father is a state program specialist there at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which operates AmeriCorps and other service programs.