Full Citation
Title: Sources of Change in the Life-Cycle Decisions of American Men and Women: 1962-2014
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2016
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Abstract: We study life-cycle decisions of five cohorts of American men and women born from the 1930s to the 1970s in a unified econometric framework applied to CPS data. The men and women in our model make individual decisions when single, joint decisions when married, and interact in a marriage market. Our model succeeds in explaining differences in education, work, marriage/divorce and fertility across the five cohorts using shifts in five exogenous factors: parental education, the distribution of potential partners, divorce laws, the wage/job offer distribution, and birth control technology. For example, one major change between the 1935 and 1975 cohorts was an increase in the employment rate of married women aged 25 to 34 from 29% to 60%. Our model attributes almost 2/3 of this increase to improved wage/job offer distributions for women, while 1/3 is accounted for by improved birth control technology. Another major change was the increase in womens college graduation rate from 6% to 37%. Our model attributes roughly 40% of this change to higher mothers education, 33% to lower divorce costs, 20% to improved wage/job offers and 7% to changes in the marriage offer distribution. Availability of oral contraception explains the entire drop in children of single mothers. It explains most of the drop in completed fertility for married women, but economic factors explain most of the delay in fertility.
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Authors: Eckstein, Zvi; Keane, Michael; Lifshitz, Osnat
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Publication Number: DP11393
Institution: CEPR
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Gender, Other
Countries: United States