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I. Introduction
Marriage promotion is part of the policy efforts to improve the well-being of children in unmarried families under the assumption that marriage is a better structured environment to raise children than is cohabitation (e.g., Graefe and Lichter 2008). The U.S. initiative includes efforts to encourage transitions of cohabiting parents into marriage. The effort is in response to the observation that children in parental cohabitation have lower levels of well-being than do children in parental marriage in the U.S. (e.g., Raley, Frisco and Wildsmith 2005). Given that parental time investment in children is linked to fewer behavioral problems in the U.S. (e.g., Hofferth 2006; Huston and Rosenkrantz 2005; Lareau and Weininger 2008), restrictions over time spent with parents, particularly with fathers, is one route through which children of cohabitation have lower levels of well-being. Studies have documented that children spend fewer minutes with their cohabiting fathers than they spend with their married biological fathers (Hofferth and Anderson 2003), though they spend similar amounts of time with mothers whether the mothers are cohabiting or married (Kendig and Bianchi 2008).
However, whether and how parental cohabitation (as opposed to marriage) accounts for the lower level of parental time investment in these families is not well known. Do the characteristics inherent in cohabitation that separates it from marriage, structure parental time investment gaps between children whose parents are cohabiting relative to children whose parents are married? Alternatively, does the gap in parental time investment across the two union types reflect the contrasting socioeconomic and demographic compositions of parents in these unions structured by their social-institutional context?
One way to answer these questions is to conduct a cross-national comparative analysis of union type gaps in childcare time. Specifically, comparing the variation in union-type gaps across national contexts where resources are unequally distributed between married and cohabiting couples on the one hand, versus others that allocate their resources more equally, provides an opportunity to understand the factors associated with parental time investment gaps. The U.S. and Sweden are useful national contexts for this purpose. In general, the U.S. tends to provide more resource access to married couples than to cohabiting couples (Cherlin 2009), while Sweden tends to provide similar resource access to couples in both union types (Bradley 1996;...