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Erschienen in: Demography 4/2014

01.08.2014

Can Pro-Marriage Policies Work? An Analysis of Marginal Marriages

verfasst von: Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer

Erschienen in: Demography | Ausgabe 4/2014

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Abstract

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, one must distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the absence of a state intervention (average marriage). We exploit the suspension of a cash-on-hand marriage subsidy in Austria to examine the differential behavior of marginal and average marriages. The announcement of an impending suspension of this subsidy led to an enormous marriage boom among eligible couples that allows us to locate marginal marriages. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we show that marginal marriages are surprisingly as stable as average marriages but produce fewer children, children later in marriage, and children who are less healthy at birth.

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Fußnoten
1
In theory, legal marriage may increase well-being (compared with cohabitation) if marriage acts as a commitment device that fosters cooperation and/or induces partners to make more relationship-specific investments (Matouschek and Rasul 2008); this argument presumes that it is more costly to exit a marriage than to end cohabitation.
 
2
Conceptually, we relate here to the treatment effect literature and employ a framework of potential outcomes (counterfactual reasoning). In the terminology of this literature, one could term marginal marriages “compliers” and average marriages “always-takers” (Imbens and Angrist 1994).
 
3
In the worst case, the state may create unstable marriages with additional children—that is, children who would have not been conceived in the counterfactual without policy intervention.
 
4
In a recent working paper, Persson (2013) revisited the analysis of the Swedish reform. Other papers (Dahl 2010; Finlay and Neumark 2009) have concentrated on subpopulations (prison inmates and teenagers) that are typically not the target of pro-marriage policy.
 
5
For a comprehensive overview of U.S. policies promoting marriage, see Gardiner et al. (2002) and Brotherson and Duncan (2004). Wood et al. (2012) evaluated relationship skills education programs serving unmarried parents.
 
6
TANF was created by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act instituted in 1996. It replaced the welfare programs known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program, and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program.
 
7
See the summary of key demographic trends for Austria and some selected countries in Table A.1 in Online Resource 1.
 
8
Zeman (2003) found that cohabitation (versus marriage) in Austria is basically determined by education and religious denomination, which are variables that we can control for in the empirical analysis.
 
9
See Austrian Law: BGBl. 460/1971. Because it is not always clear whether foreigners are tax liable in Austria in such a sense, we eliminated foreign citizens from the analysis.
 
10
See, for instance, Kronen Zeitung on August 27, 1987. The suspension was argued with a necessity of budget cuts and was quickly enacted without any further parliamentary discussion on October 21, 1987. Detailed research of the daily press archives shows that there was also no prior discussion of such a suspension, nor was there a parliamentary debate before August 1987.
 
11
The transfer effect can be highlighted by the following thought experiment. Imagine the existence of a marriage subsidy that is not publicly announced, but couples who marry (or a subgroup of them) still receive a subsidy upon marriage. Here, the transfer effect is the difference in the counterfactual outcomes (with and without subsidy).
 
12
In the mid-1980s, about every fifth child was born out of wedlock. This number had increased to every fourth child by 1995.
 
13
No major divorce law reform took place through the sample period. Divorce by mutual consent and unilateral divorce have been available since 1978. Divorce by mutual consent is possible after at least six months of separation, and unilateral divorce is available after three years apart.
 
14
We presume that a person with no ongoing records in the ASSD has left Austria.
 
15
The reduced sample period is a result of the limited possibility to link the Austrian Marriage Register with the Austrian Birth Register before 1984.
 
16
This assumption is not crucial for the estimation analysis. Moreover, we will discuss alternative (more elaborated) interpolation strategies.
 
17
All the results are presented as hazard ratios—that is, the hazard rate of spouses with characteristics X * relative to the hazard rate of the base group X, https://static-content.springer.com/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs13524-014-0312-y/MediaObjects/13524_2014_312_IEq1_HTML.gif . Figure D.1 in Online Resource 4 plots the hazard function by group for marriages formed between October and December in 1986, 1987, and 1988. For all groups (and years), given a marriage that has survived until its third year, the divorce hazard actually decreased over time. In the case of the control and the treatment group 1, there are no statistically significant differences between the hazard functions of 1986, 1987, and 1988; similar results hold for treatment group 2, with the exception of the very first periods.
 
18
Frimmel et al. (2013) showed for Austria that a lower age at marriage, different religious denominations, and the presence of premarital children are associated with a higher risk of divorce.
 
19
We use the definition of marital children from the Austrian Birth Register, where a child is coded as a marital child if the mother was married at any time during pregnancy.
 
20
Thus, by 2007, approximately 80 % of the women in our sample are aged 40 or older.
 
21
Looking at the extensive marital fertility margin, marginal marriages are approximately 4 % (T 1) and 6 % (T 2) more likely to have no marital offspring at all (measured in 2007).
 
22
Marginal marriages have somewhat fewer children and have them later in life. We take the latter fact into account by including mother’s age at birth as a control variable.
 
23
The exact mechanism behind this culling process remains unclear. Still, researchers in different fields agree that the sex ratio is a useful proxy for early spontaneous abortions (Almond and Edlund 2007; Catalano and Bruckner 2006).
 
24
The same is true for a binary indicator capturing premature birth.
 
25
See, for instance Ichino and Winter-Ebmer (1999) for a study in which different instruments shift different populations and therefore lead to different conclusions.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Can Pro-Marriage Policies Work? An Analysis of Marginal Marriages
verfasst von
Wolfgang Frimmel
Martin Halla
Rudolf Winter-Ebmer
Publikationsdatum
01.08.2014
Verlag
Springer US
Erschienen in
Demography / Ausgabe 4/2014
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Elektronische ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0312-y

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