TY - JOUR
T1 - The normativity of marriage and the marriage premium for children’s outcomes
AU - Torche, Florencia
AU - Abufhele, Alejandra
N1 - Funding Information:
extremely helpful comments and suggestions. Abufhele acknowledges financial support from Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, Programa de Investigación Aso-ciativa, Centro de Investigación en Educación 160007 and Agencia Nacional de Inves-tigación y Desarrollo, Fondo de Financiamiento de Centros de Investigación en Áreas Prioritarias 15130009. This article was presented at the Population Association of America annual meeting, the American Sociological Association annual meeting, and seminars at the University of Texas at Austin; University of California, Los Angeles; Columbia University; and Stanford University. We thank participants at these venues for their comments and suggestions. Direct correspondence to Florencia Torche, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 120, Stanford, California 94305. E-mail: torche@stanford.edu
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/1
Y1 - 2021/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104330992&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/713382
DO - 10.1086/713382
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104330992
SN - 0002-9602
VL - 126
SP - 931
EP - 968
JO - American Journal of Sociology
JF - American Journal of Sociology
IS - 4
ER -