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Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (N = 2,954), a birth cohort study, this work examines how gains in earnings and income are associated with marriage and subsequent childbearing for low-income couples. Using change models, results indicate that positive changes in earnings, controlling for baseline levels of earnings, were associated with greater odds of marriage. Cohabiting couples who became poor were associated with a 37% decrease in marriage likelihood. Neither earnings nor income was affiliated with additional fertility. Results are consistent with the Financial Expectations and Family Formation theory, which posits that positive economic circumstances are necessary for marriage, but are not associated with subsequent childbearing.
Key Words: family structure, Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey, living arrangements, low-income families.
A profound demographic shift that has occurred in American family landscape is the apparent separation between marriage and fertility deci- sions, particularly for those with less education. Ellwood and Jencks (2004), using data from the Current Population Survey, found that among high school dropouts who were bom between 1940 and 1944, 83% had married and 82% had their first child by the age of 25. For high school dropouts bom 20 years later, 78% still had their first child by 25, but only 66% had married. This disconnect between the timing of marriage and of childbearing has stimulated numerous policy initiatives to encourage marriage, particularly among those who are low income and already have children (Dion, 2005).
Though these initiatives' results are not yet known, the broader policy question-What influences the marital and subsequent fertility decisions of those who already have a child?-remains understudied (Lichter, Batson, & Brown, 2004). The lack of attention to parents' family formation decisions may stem from the pervasiveness of traditional economic models of family formation (e.g., Becker, 1981), which have assumed that marriage and fertility choices are inherently connected. Such models do not address parents' marital behavior or why marriage and childbearing may be disconnected decisions (Ellwood & Jencks, 2004).
An alternative view of family formation, emerging from several qualitative studies (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Gibson-Davis, McLanahan, & Edin, 2005), explains the separation between marriage and childbearing among parents as arising from the different economic standards applied to the two. This idea, which I...