Young people who graduate from high school, get a job, and get married before having children, in that order, are far less likely to be in poverty and far more likely to have a solid footing in the middle class later in life. This path to adulthood has been dubbed the "success sequence." The cultural norms and values embedded in the…

The United States shows striking racial and ethnic differences in marriage patterns. Compared to both white and Hispanic women, black women marry later in life, are less likely to marry at all, and have higher rates of marital instability. Kelly Raley, Megan Sweeney, and Danielle Wondra begin by reviewing common explanations for these differences,…

Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as instrumental variables in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on the high school dropout rate of…

We explore women's marital naming choices using the 2004 American Community Survey (ACS). Six percent of native-born married women have nonconventional surnames. "Nonconventional" surnames include hyphenated surnames, two surnames, and women who kept their own surname at marriage. Characteristics associated with nonconventional surname use include…

This paper investigates the effect of gender differences and household bargaining on charitable giving. I replicate the study of Andreoni, Brown, and Rischall (2003) using a different data set--the recently available Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) supplement on charitable giving--and test the sensitivity of their results to inclusion of…

Using Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), this article documents the extent to which cohabitors begin their union with intentions to marry (indicated by either being engaged or having definite plans to marry) and how this is related to subsequent cohabitation transitions, building on earlier literature examining expectations.…

Research on nonmarital fertility has focused almost exclusively on unmarried mothers, due in part to a lack of fertility information for men. Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth allows exploration of nonmarital fertility for both genders.The authors compare the characteristics of unmarried first-time mothers (n = 2,455) and fathers (n…

Bivariate analyses showed that continuously married urban African American, non-Hispanic White, and Hispanic fathers and mothers reporting greater marital support and less relational control experienced a decrease in depressive symptoms. Multiple regression showed a stronger association between concurrent marital support and decreased depressive…

This study draws on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 5,929) to analyze the moderating effects of race and marriage on the motherhood wage penalty. Fixed-effects models reveal that for Hispanic women, motherhood is not associated with a wage penalty. For African Americans, only married mothers with more than 2 children pay a…

The present study investigated the association of mothers' marriage and changes in young adolescents' cognitive and socioemotional development and changes in family processes. Analyses employed longitudinal data from the "Three-City Study" to track maternal partnerships for 860 low-income adolescents (10-14 years-old in Wave 1) across a…

Examines the effect of family indicators, including marriage, on migration from, and return to, Puerto Rico in the 1980s using data from surveys of 3,175 and 2,032 women. Single women apparently use migration to gain independence, but married women often follow men in the migration stream. (SLD)

Life history data from both origin and destination areas were used to examine the relationship between migration and fertility among Puerto Rican women. Migration to the U.S. mainland had opposite effects on childbearing for single versus married or cohabiting women. For all migrants, migration played an integral part in the family formation…