Katherine Michelmore

Change in the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following the Birth of a Child

The share of births to cohabiting couples has increased dramatically in recent decades. How we evaluate the implications of these increases depends critically on change in the stability of cohabiting families. This study examines change over time in the stability of U.S. couples who have a child together, drawing on data from the 1995 and 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We parse out the extent to which change in the stability of cohabiting and married families reflects change in couples’ behavior versus shifts in the characteristics of those who cohabit, carefully accounting for trajectories of cohabitation and marriage around the couple’s first birth. Multivariate event history models provide evidence of a weakening association between cohabitation and instability given that marriage occurs at some point before or after the couple’s first birth. The more recent data show statistically indistinguishable separation risks for couples who have a birth in marriage without ever cohabiting, those who cohabit and then have a birth in marriage, and those who have a birth in cohabitation and then marry. Cohabiting unions with children are significantly less stable when de-coupled from marriage, although the parents in this group also differ most from others on observed (and likely, unobserved) characteristics.

The Effect of Income on Educational Attainment: Evidence from State Earned Income Tax Credit Expansions

As of the early 2000s, the gap in college enrollment between children growing up in the highest income quartile and the lowest income quartile was over 50 percentage points (Bailey and Dynarski 2011). There is much debate in the literature about what role household income plays in producing this gap. A major impediment in studying this question is the lack of plausibly exogenous variation in income. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one potential source of exogenous variation in household income that may increase educational attainment among low-income youth. Using variation in state EITC benefit generosity, I use a difference-in-difference framework to analyze how an increase in household income affects the educational attainment of children from low socioeconomic status households. Conservative estimates suggest that following an increase in the maximum EITC by

Fertility patterns of college graduates by field of study, US women born 1960-79

1,000, 18-23 year olds growing up in likely EITC- eligible households are 1 percentage point more likely to have ever enrolled in college and 0.3 percentage points more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree. These results are concentrated among individuals who were younger than 12 at the time of state EITC implementation, suggesting that the EITC increases educational attainment primarily by providing extra income to households with young children. I find no effect of EITC expansions on older children, for whom the EITC acts as a form of financial aid.

The missing women in STEM? Assessing gender differentials in the factors associated with transition to first jobs

Building on recent European studies, we used the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide the first analysis of fertility differences between groups of US college graduates by their undergraduate field of study. We used multilevel event-history models to investigate possible institutional and selection mechanisms linking field of study to delayed fertility and childlessness. The results are consistent with those found for Europe in showing an overall difference of 10 percentage points between levels of childlessness across fields, with the lowest levels occurring for women in health and education, intermediate levels for women in science and technology, and the highest levels for women in arts and social sciences. The mediating roles of the following field characteristics were assessed: motherhood employment penalties; percentage of men; family attitudes; and marriage patterns. Childlessness was higher among women in fields with a moderate representation of men, less traditional family attitudes, and late age at first marriage.

The Long-Term Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Children's Education and Employment Outcomes

Women remain underrepresented in the STEM workforce. We assess explanations for womens underrepresentation in STEM jobs, focusing on a cohort that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when women dramatically increased their representation in the scientific labor force. Data are from the NLSY79, and our analysis focuses on members of this cohort who received a college degree, with an emphasis on those who completed a degree in a STEM field. Our analyses test the extent to which college major, expectations to work in STEM, and family expectations shaped transitions into STEM occupations within two years of degree completion. Among those majoring in STEM fields there were no gender differences in transitioning into STEM jobs, though there were sizable differences in transitions to STEM employment by field of study. Of note are gender differences in associations between family expectations and transitions into STEM employment. The most career oriented women, who expected to marry late and limit fertility, were no more likely to enter STEM jobs than were women who anticipated marrying young and having two or more children. The men most likely to enter STEM occupations, in contrast, adhered to significantly more conventional gender ideologies than their female counterparts, expecting to marry at younger ages but also to remain childless. Results of our regression decomposition indicated that marriage and family expectations and gender ideology worked in opposite directions for men and women. Nonetheless, the majority of the gender disparity in transitions into STEM jobs was related to womens underrepresentation in engineering and computer science fields of study.

The Gap Within the Gap

Using 4 decades of variation in the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), we estimate the impact of exposure to EITC expansions in childhood on education and employment outcomes in adulthood. Reduced-form results suggest that an additional

Transitions From Sexual Relationships Into Cohabitation and Beyond

1,000 in EITC exposure when a child is 13–18 years old increases the likelihood of completing high school (1.3%), completing college (4.2%), and being employed as a young adult (1.0%) and earnings by 2.2%. Our analysis reveals that the primary channel through which the EITC improves these outcomes is increases in pretax family earnings.

Timing Is Money: Does Lump-Sum Payment of Tax Credits Induce High-Cost Borrowing?

Gaps in educational achievement between high- and low-income children are growing. Administrative data sets maintained by states and districts lack information about income but do indicate whether a student is eligible for subsidized school meals. We leverage the longitudinal structure of these data sets to develop a new measure of economic disadvantage. Half of eighth graders in Michigan are eligible for a subsidized meal, but just 14% have been eligible for subsidized meals in every grade since kindergarten. These children score 0.94 standard deviations below those who are never eligible for meal subsidies and 0.23 below those who are occasionally eligible. There is a negative, linear relationship between grades spent in economic disadvantage and eighth-grade test scores. This is not an exposure effect; the relationship is almost identical in third-grade, before children have been exposed to varying years of economic disadvantage. Survey data show that the number of years that a child will spend eligible for subsidized lunch is negatively correlated with her or his current household income. Years eligible for subsidized meals can therefore be used as a reasonable proxy for income. Our proposed measure can be used to estimate heterogeneous effects in program evaluations, to improve value-added calculations, and to better target resources.

Cross-National Comparisons of Union Stability in Cohabiting and Married Families With Children

Much research on cohabitation has focused on transitions from cohabitation to marriage or dissolution, but less is known about how rapidly women progress into cohabitation, what factors are associated with the tempo to shared living, and whether the timing into cohabitation is associated with subsequent marital transitions. We use data from the 2006–2013 National Survey of Family Growth to answer these questions among women whose most recent sexual relationship began within 10 years of the interview. Life table results indicate that transitions into cohabitation are most common early in sexual relationships; nearly one-quarter of women had begun cohabiting within six months of becoming sexually involved. Multivariate analyses reveal important social class disparities in the timing to cohabitation. Not only are women from more-advantaged backgrounds significantly less likely to cohabit, but those who do cohabit enter shared living at significantly slower tempos than women whose mothers lacked a college degree. In addition, among sexual relationships that transitioned into cohabiting unions, college-educated women were significantly more likely to transition into marriage than less-educated women. Finally, although the tempo effect is only weakly significant, women who moved in within the first year of their sexual relationship demonstrated lower odds of marrying than did women who deferred cohabiting for over a year. Relationship processes are diverging by social class, contributing to inequality between more- and less-advantaged young adults.

The Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Household Finances

We use the Survey of Income and Program Participation to analyze the impact of the expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit on household savings and high cost debt. Results suggest that increases in tax credit generosity are associated with increases in household savings and high-cost debt. We investigate whether these increases are due to consumption smoothing over the year. The evidence suggest that families use credit card debt, but not savings, to finance consumption between EITC payments. We take this as evidence of the presence of the credit card debt puzzle, and estimate its costs for the EITC program.