What Accounts for the Increase in the Number of Single Households

Abstract

Between the mid seventies and the beginning of the nineties the share of single females grew dramatically in the U.S. (from 17% to 30%). So did the share of single mothers (from 12% to 17%). At the same time relative wages within and between sexes underwent huge changes. In this paper we measure the contribution that changes in relative wages had in accounting for these and other demographic facts. We construct a model where agents di#er in sex, take marital status and fertility decisions and invest in their children's human capital. Our findings show that changes in relative earnings potential account for: i) almost ninety percent of the observed change in the share of single women, and ii) all the observed change in the share of single mothers, with a sharper increase among poor women. This occurs mainly through a drop in the model economy marriage rate that mimics the pattern found in the data. # We thank Alix Beith for her comments. Regalia thanks the Department of Economics of the University of Pennsylvania for its hospitality. Ros-Rull thanks the National Science Foundation for Grant SES--0079504 and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation for their support. 1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.