Jo Anna Gray

The rising share of nonmarital births: Fertility choice or marriage behavior?

Much of the sharp rise in the share of nonmarital births in the United States has been attributed to changes in the fertility choices of unmarried and married women—in response, it is often argued, to public policy. In contrast, we develop and test a model that attributes the rise to changes in marriage behavior, with no necessary changes in fertility. A variety of empirical tests strongly support this conclusion and invites focused attention to issues related to marriage behavior as well as to the interactions between marriage and fertility.

On equilibrium credit rationing and interest rates

Abstract In many recent studies of equilibrium credit rationing, rationing takes the form of restrictions on the number of loans an intermediary makes. These studies conclude that when rationing occurs, interest rates will be invariant with respect to credit supply. We show that if credit is rationed by restricting the size of loans rather than the number of loans, tighter credit can cause interest rates to fall . This findings suggests a role for credit rationing in explaining the difficulty of empirically verifying a negative relationship between interest rates and investment, and points to rationing as a factor that may act to destabilize credit markets.

Response to Ermisch, Martin, and Wu

Our recent paper in Demography (Gray, Stockard, and Stone 2006) has attracted the close scrutiny of several prominent academics. Three sets of formal comments, authored independently by Ermisch, Martin, and Wu (EMW), appear in this issue of Demography. In this response we argue that the analysis and evidence of our 2006 paper have withstood the scrutiny of EMW. In particular, we find that a substantial part of the rising share of nonmarital births since 1970 is due to a selection effect associated with marriage. This same selection effect also explains how birth rates could rise in both groups, even though their combined birth rate did not. In sum, though we appreciate the opportunity to expand on several key aspects of our 2006 article, we see no reason to substantially revise any of our major conclusions based on the EMW comments.

Race Differences in Cohort Effects on Non-Marital Fertility in the United States

We employ newly developed methods to disentangle age, period and cohort effects on non-marital fertility ratios from 1972 through 2002 for black and white women ages 20-44 in the United States. We focus on three cohort factors: family structure, school enrollment and the sex ratio. For both blacks and whites, cohorts with less traditional family structures have higher NFRs. Other results differ by race. The impact of school enrollment on NFRs is significantly negative for whites, but significantly positive for blacks. The impact of sex ratio is significantly negative for blacks, but insignificant for whites. If black women and white women had cohort characteristics typical of the other group, age-specific NFRs for black women would decline markedly, while those for whites would increase markedly.