Nber Working Paper Series When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-market Value of Men

The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers or living in single-headed households. A potential contributor to both phenomena is the declining labor-market opportunities faced by males, which make them less valuable as marital partners. We exploit large scale, plausibly exogenous labor-demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the supply of young ‘marriageable’ males affect marriage, fertility and children's living circumstances. Trade shocks to manufacturing industries have differentially negative impacts on the labor market prospects of men and degrade their marriage-market value along multiple dimensions: diminishing their relative earnings— particularly at the lower segment of the distribution—reducing their physical availability in tradeimpacted labor markets, and increasing their participation in risky and damaging behaviors. As predicted by a simple model of marital decision-making under uncertainty, we document that adverse shocks to the supply of `marriageable' men reduce the prevalence of marriage and lower fertility but raise the fraction of children born to young and unwed mothers and living in in poor single-parent households. The falling marriage-market value of young men appears to be a quantitatively important contributor to the rising rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing and singleheaded childrearing in the United States. David Autor Department of Economics, E52-438 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 and NBER [email protected] David Dorn University of Zurich Department of Economics Schoenberggasse 1 CH-8001 Zurich Switzerland and CEPR [email protected] Gordon Hanson IR/PS 0519 University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0519 and NBER [email protected] “The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghettos—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.” William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, 1996, pp. xiii. “Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.” J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, 2016, p. 144.