Reassessing the Consequence of Nonmarital Childbearing for First Marriage Formation

Dohoon Lee, New York University
Kathleen Mullan Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and propensity score weighting models to examine the relationship between nonmarital childbearing and first marriage formation among a recent cohort of young women. While prior research and policy discussion have focused mostly on marriage effects, they have yet to provide insight into unmarried mothers’ marital prospects. We assess the effect of nonmarital childbearing on first marriage formation from event history models that utilize "inverse probability of treatment weighting" estimators, in order to make women who had a nonmarital first birth and women who did not balanced on observed covariates. Next, to address other facets of family change associated with nonmarital fertility, we fit our models to a series of subsamples based on teenage childbearing status, cohabitation status, and race/ethnicity. Finally, we conduct a formal sensitivity analysis to examine whether our estimates are robust to unobserved selection bias.