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Title: The Role of Education in Marital Decisions of Blacks and Whites
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Nandi, Alita |
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The Role of Education in Marital Decisions of Blacks and Whites Working Paper, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, September 2005 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, The Ohio State University Keyword(s): Marriage; Modeling; Racial Differences; Schooling Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Recent U.S. policies that promote marriage have prompted researchers to reexamine the reasons for the dramatic difference in marriage rates of blacks and whites. Black marriage rates are more than 20% lower than white marriage rates. In this paper, I examine how much of the black-white marriage gap is due to differences in their schooling. In particular, I ask how much of the marriage gap would be eliminated if the racial differences in schooling attainment were reduced. I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to simultaneously estimate schooling and marriage models. I find that increasing the schooling of black men by one year increases the predicted probability of marriage (by age 35) by more than 5%. The estimated effect is much smaller for white men and black women, and it is negative for white women. Using these estimated schooling coefficients, I predict that elimination of black-white differences in schooling (which I simulate by assigning all blacks the mean schooling of their white counterparts) would decrease the gap in marriage probabilities by 17% for men and 4.5% for women. I conclude that public policy designed to increase education can have small but nontrivial effects to increase black marriage rates. |
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Bibliography Citation
Nandi, Alita. "The Role of Education in Marital Decisions of Blacks and Whites." Working Paper, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, September 2005. |