Previous research finds that marriage is associated with better health and lower mortality, and one of the mechanisms underlying this association is health-related selection out of marriage. Using longitudinal survey data from 2,348 couples from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examine whether certain health behaviors-smoking and binge drinking-are associated with risk of unio...

I use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 16,756) to measure trends in marital dissolution rates for U.S. women by education level. In marriage cohorts from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, marital dissolution rates fell among women with a 4year college degree or more, but remained high among women with less than a 4-year college degree. This diverging trend began in the mid-1970s an...

Using a sample of Italian women interviewed in 2003 in the survey “Family and Social Subject,” this paper investigates two issues: (1) how a woman’s family life-course (union status and parity/ages of children born in the first marriage) influences the risk of a post-dissolution birth among separated women; and (2) how the experience of a marital disruption affects a woman’s cumulated fertility...

The objective of this paper is to identify the incentives and barriers to marriage among cohabiting women, especially disadvantaged mothers who are targets of welfare reform. We use the newly released cohabitation data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2000), which tracks the partners of cohabiting women across survey waves. Our results support several conclusions. First, coh...

This paper considers marriage, divorce and reciprocity-based cooperation by couples in the form of sharing of earnings-risk. While risk sharing is one bene...t to marriage it is also limited by divorce risk. With search in the marriage market there may be multiple equilibria di¤ering not only in family formation and dissolution patterns but also in the role of marriage in providing informal ins...

This article presents two procedures that are useful in both macro and micro projection/simulation models concerning marriage/union formation and dissolution. One is for computing time-varying sex-age-specific rates that are consistent with independently projected life course propensities of marriage/union formation and dissolution in the one-sex life course simulation model. Another one is for...

Increases in interracial marriage have been interpreted as reflecting reduced social distance among racial and ethnic groups, but little is known about the stability of interracial marriages. Using six panels of Survey of Income and Program Participation (N 1⁄4 23,139 married couples), we found that interracial marriages are less stable than endogamous marriages, but these findings did not hold...