Economic Restructuring and the Retreat From Marriage

Few if any empirical studies have adequately accounted for or “explained” the rapid and apparently on-going changes in the American family, especially during the recent period of economic expansion. Our objective is to link recent U.S. marriage trends to changes in the employment and earnings of the marriage-eligible population, in state welfare benefit levels, and in macroeconomic performance which are played out differently in regional economies (i.e., states). Specially, we link pooled cross-sectional data from the Census Bureau’s 1986 through 1996 annual demographic supplements of the March Current Population Survey (CPS) to state-year specific indicators of economic performance now available in the Regional Economic Information System (REIS). Our results, based on regression switching models, provide little evidence that the recent economic recovery has slowed or reversed the longstanding decline in marriage in the United States. The downward trend continued even as the overall “marriage premium” — the difference in income between single women and married couples — grew over the study period. Additional sensitivity analyses indicate that post1990 delays in marriage continued to be widely observed across diverse female population groups, including disadvantaged women that have been the target of social policies that promote marriage (e.g., recent welfare reform legislature). Our results clearly call into question the appropriateness of monocausal economic explanations of declining marriage, which typically emphasize the blurring of traditional gender roles regarding work and family life in the United States.