Lee A. Lillard

Nonmarital Childbearing: Influences of Education, Marriage, and Fertility

We examined the determinants of nonmarital fertility, focusing on the effects of other life-course events: education, marriage, marital dissolution, and marital fertility. Since these determinants are potentially endogenous, we modeled the processes that generate them jointly with nonmarital fertility and accounted for the sequencing of events and the unobserved correlations across processes. The results showed that the risk of nonmarital conception increases immediately after leaving school and that the educational effects are less pronounced for black women than for other women. The risk is lower for previously married women than for never-married women, even controlling for age, but this reduction is significant only for black women. The more children a woman already has, the lower her risk of nonmarital childbearing, particularly if the earlier children were born during a previous marriage. Ignoring endogeneity issues seriously biases the estimates of several substantively important effects.

Interrelated family-building behaviors: Cohabitation, marriage, and nonmarital conception

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 are used to estimate a series of models of entry into marriage, entry into cohabitation, and nonmarital pregnancy. Our models account explicitly for the endogeneity of one outcome as a predictor of another by taking into account both heterogeneity across individuals due to unmeasured factors that may affect all these outcomes and the correlation in the unmeasured factors across processes. We find that these heterogeneity components are strongly and positively related across the outcomes. Women who are more likely to cohabit, marry, or become pregnant while unmarried are also more likely to do each of the others. Although black and white women differ in the likelihood of these behaviors, the interrelations of the behaviors are quite similar across groups.

Inconsistencies in reporting the occurrence and timing of first intercourse among adolescents

Two types of reporting inconsistency for sexual initiation were analyzed—event occurrence and its timing—using data from two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Overall, 11.1% of those who reported they were sexually active at the time of first interview denied this at the subsequent one. Males of each race/ethnic group had higher percentages of inconsistency than their female counterparts. Being older, not living with parents, or having a highly educated mother was negatively associated with rescinding. Among those reporting sexual experience at both interviews, only 22.2% reported the same date of first sex. On average, teens revised their age at first sex to older ages, and boys, especially African American boys, had large variability in reporting dates, as did teens with lower verbal ability. Seven strategies for resolving inconsistent reports are presented and implications for substantive findings are discussed.

Socioeconomic Factors Affecting the Utilization of Surgical Operations

Between 1963 and 1970 public programs were introduced to reduce inequalities in access to medical care. We examined differentials in surgical utilization among socioeconomic groups in 1970 as well as changes between 1963 and 1970. Multivariate analysis of National Health Interview Survey data indicated that large increases in surgical utilization occurred among disadvantaged groups: the aged, lower educated and nonwhites in urban areas. Some differential by race and residence remains, but is strongly related to income. Income had a large positive effect on surgical utilization, but this effect was less strong in 1970 than in 1963. Education had a negative effect on surgical utilization. Eleven surgical procedures were selected and scaled on indexes of complexity, urgency and necessity. These indexes do not vary among demographic groups that have significant differences in surgical utilization. However, lower-income groups utilized to a lesser extent procedures rated lowest on the necessity scale.

Marriage, Divorce and the Work and Earning Careers of Spouses

Social Security benefits depend on the employment and earnings history of the covered worker, but, especially for women, they depend on one’s marital history and the employment and earnings history of one’s spouse. This paper examines the interrelationship between marriage, divorce, employment and earnings of men and women. Since getting married (or getting divorced) tends to affect women’s employment choices differently than men’s, we consider the sexes separately. We estimate: (1) the impact of earnings, work hours and wages while unmarried on the likelihood of (re)marriage, (2) the effect of these measures of career success while married on the likelihood of divorce; (3) the effect of being married on men’s and women’s propensity to participate in the labor force, and conditional on participation, the effect of being married on earnings, wages and annual hours of work; for all these labor market outcomes we also assess the impact of the length of the marriage. Together, these results show a pattern of gender specialization in marriage, with men moving toward and women moving away from more intensive and extensive employment and the financial gain it brings. Success in the labor market while single increases the likelihood of marriage for men and decreases it for women. More work and greater financial rewards from work tend to stabilize marriage for men and destabilize marriage for women. Our results also show substantial change in the relationship between marital and employment careers for those born after WWII, but only for women. The employment careers of younger women are much less responsive to marriage than were those of their mothers or older sisters.