On Population Structure and Marriage Dynamics

I develop an equilibrium, two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age at first marriage of men and women. Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model I show that, given an increase of the desired number of children, age at marriage is affected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, with single men outnumbering single women in equilibrium. Using an extended version of the model to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the U.S “baby boom”. I show that demographic transitional dynamics after the baby boom may account for approximately a 23% of the increase in men's age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, albeit the impact on women's age is small.population structure, marriage, search

Gender differences and the timing of first marriages

In this article we provide a simple model of the marriage market where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their survival probabilities, in their fecundity, and in their earnings. We show that modelling the marriage decision in a very simple model economy is sufficient to account for much of the observed marriage behavior in the United States in the year 2000. We conclude that gender differences in fecundity are all important in accounting for marriage behavior, and that differences in earnings matter little. We also conclude that, even though they are in short supply, the market power of fecund women is not enough for them to demand compensation in all cases. And that studying the marriage decision without modelling explicitly the roles played by age and by fecundity, as has been typically done by the previous literature, makes little sense

Gender Differences and the Timing of First Marriages

We study the steady state of an overlapping generations economy where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their fecundity, in their earnings, and in their survival probabilities. These three features are age-dependent and deterministic. Singles meet at random. They propose when the expected value of their current match exceeds that of remaining single. If both partners propose, the meeting ends up in a marriage. Marriages last until death does them apart, widows and widowers never remarry, and people make no other economic decisions whatsoever. In our model economy people marry because they value companionship, bearing children, and sharing their income with their spouses. The matching function depends on the single sex-ratios which are endogenous. Our model economy has only two free parameters: the search friction and the utility share of bearing children. We choose their values to match the median ages of first-time brides and grooms. We show that modeling the marriage decision in this simple way is sufficient to account for the age distributions of ever and never married men and women, for the probabilities of marrying a younger bride and a younger groom, and for the age distributions of first births observed in the United States in the year 2000. The previous literature on this topic claims that marriage is a waiting game in which women are choosier than men, and old and rich pretenders outbid the young and poor ones in their competition for fecund women. In this article we tell a different story. We show that their shorter biological clocks make women uniformly less choosy than men of the same age. This turns marriage into a rushing game in which women are willing to marry older men because delaying marriage is too costly for women. Our theory predicts that most of the gender age difference at first marriage will persist even if the gender wage-gap disappears. It also predicts that the advances in the reproductive technologies will play a large role in reducing the age difference at first marriage.marriage, search, sex ratio

The Impact of Unilateral Divorce on Crime

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of unilateral divorce on crime. First, using crime rates from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report program for the period 1965-1998 and differences in the timing in the introduction of the reform, we find that unilateral divorce has a positive impact on violent crime rates, with an 8% to 12% average increase for the period under consideration. Second, arrest data not only confirms the findings of a positive impact on violent crime but also shows that this impact is concentrated among those age groups (15 to 24) that are more likely to engage in these type of offenses. Specifically, for the age group 15-19, we observe an average impact over the period under analysis of 40% and 36% for murder and aggravated assault arrest rates, respectively. Disaggregating total arrest rates by race, we find that the effects are driven by the Black sub-sample. Third, using the age at the time of the divorce law reform as a second source of variation to analyze age-specific arrest rates we confirm the positive impact on the different types of violent crime as well as a positive impact for property crime rates, controlling for all confounding factors that may operate at the state-year, state age or age-year level. The results for murder arrests and for homicide rates (Supplemental Homicide Report) for the 15-24 age groups are robust with respect to specifications and specifically those that include year-state and year-age dummies. The magnitude goes from 15% to 40% depending on the specification and the age at the time of the reform.arrest rates, unilateral divorce, crime rates

Gender differences and the timing of first marriages

In this article we provide a simple model of the marriage market where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their survival probabilities, in their fecundity, and in their earnings. We show that modelling the marriage decision in a very simple model economy is sufficient to account for much of the observed marriage behavior in the United States in the year 2000. We conclude that gender differences in fecundity are all important in accounting for marriage behavior, and that differences in earnings matter little. We also conclude that, even though they are in short supply, the market power of fecund women is not enough for them to demand compensation in all cases. And that studying the marriage decision without modelling explicitly the roles played by age and by fecundity, as has been typically done by the previous literature, makes little sense.Marriage, Search, Sex ratio

School Starting Age and the choice of elementary schoolJulio Cáceres-Delpiano; Eugenio P. Giolito

Using administrative data for Chile, we study the impact of School Starting Age (SSA) on the characteristics of the school of rst enrollment. After addressing the usual concerns of endogeneity using minimum age requirements and an RD-design, we uncover gains associated with a delay of school entry at the start of the student's school life. SSA is associated withan enrollment in a school with an approximately 0.1 standard deviations higher average in standardized test scores, an increase of approximately 0.17 years in the average education of the peers' parents, and an increase of 4 percentage points in the probability of being enrolled in a private school. The heterogeneity analysis by parents' education reveals the largest gain in the probability of enrollment in a voucher school among less-educated families. We also show that the impact on school's standardized test scores occurs among girls. This heterogeneity by parents' education and student's gender di ers from that reported in previous studies

The Impact of Age of Entry on Academic Progression

Using an RD-design and public educational administrative data for Chile, we study the impact of age of entry on children outcomes. Different from previous studies, we are able to track this impact on school achievements over eleven years of the school life of a cohort of students. Our results confirm previous findings that a higher age of entry not only has a positive effect on GPA and the likelihood of passing a grade but also that this impact tends to wear off over time. However, we also find that this impact on school achievement is still present eleven years after a child has started school. Moreover, we show that this decrease in the impact on GPA masks a return associated to a higher age of entry in other dimensions. First, we show that age of entry reduces the probability of being enrolled in a public school. Secondly, during secondary school, children delaying school entry are more likely to follow an academic track and we present evidence that these children are more likely to be enrolled in schools where children coming from other schools had a higher than the mean GPA in the school of origin. Finally, also explaining the decline in the impact of age of entry on school's achievements, we find evidence that age of entry is associated to an increase in the probability that a child is enrolled in a school actively engaged in cream skimming

How unilateral divorce affects children

Using U.S. Census data for the years 1960-1980, we study the impact of unilateral divorce on outcomes of children (age 6-15) and their mothers. We find that the reform increased mothers' divorce, decreased family income and increased the fraction of mothers below the poverty line. For children, we find not only negative results on investment, measured as the probability that a child goes to a private school, but also on child outcomes, measured by the likelihood of children aged 0-4 being held back in school at the time of the reform. We then analyze outcomes of the same cohorts of children 10 years later, by studying young men and women aged 16-25 using the 1970-1990 U.S. Census. We find an increase in marginality for these cohorts, measured as the probability of living in an institution (men) or the probability of being below the poverty line (women). We find that the impact in outcomes is particularly important for black children and young adults

A Search Model of Marriage with Differential Fecundity

It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. This explanation, however, involves an implicit assumption about female specialization in home production - an assumption that does not completely hold, especially in modern times. This paper shows that a marriage market equilibrium where women marry earlier in life than men can be achieved without making any assumptions about the wage process or gender roles. The only driving force in this model is the asymmetry in fecundity horizons between men and women. When the model is calibrated with Census Data, the average age at first marriage and the pattern of the sex ratio of single men to single women over different age groups mimics the patterns observed in developed countries during the last decade (e.g. France, the U.S. and Sweden)

Early Impacts of College Aid

We analyze the impact of an expansion in government-guaranteed credit for higher education in Chile on a sample of elementary and high school students. Using students who had an alternative source of funding as a control group, and administrative records before and after the reform, we present evidence that students most likely to attend college in a future are affected in different ways. First, we show that parents of students who ex ante were more likely to be credit restricted became more likely after the reform to state that their child would end up completing college. Second, we find that relaxing credit restrictions reduces the probability of dropping out of high school, specifically among top students originally enrolled in low-performance schools and low-performance students attending better schools. Third, we find that the reform led to an increase in educational sorting. Best students switch to better schools while low-performance students go to lower-ranked schools. This sorting helps to explain why we observe a decrease (increase) in GPA and an increase (decrease) in grade repetition among better (worse) students. Then, for a sample of students that were in transition from elementary to secondary school, we show that good students are more likely to enroll in a college-oriented track. Finally, using household data and birth records aggregated at the municipal level, we find, consistent with previous findings, a reduction in teen pregnancy