IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jinter/v4y1991i1p1-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Age at Marriage, Divorce, Fertility and Labor Force Participation of Women: a Time Series Perspective

Author

Listed:
  • H. Naci Mocan

    (University of Colorado at Denver and National Bureau of Economic Research, USA
    University of Colorado at Denver, Department of Economics, Campus Box 181, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, Colorado 80217-3364, USA.)

Abstract

This paper uses vector-autoregressions to gain insights into the dynamic relationships between age at marriage, divorce, fertility, and labor force participation of women. The use of vector-autoregressions let us circumvent the statistical problems faced by previous studies. Age at marriage, fertility, the divorce rate, and the labor force participation rate are permitted to depend on the past values of each other. The impulse response simulations allowed us to observe the short-run reactions of the variables to the unexpected perturbations in the system. Contrary to the evidence presented by cross-sectional analyses, no significant influence of young marriages on the divorce rate is found: A positive shock to the proportion of young marriages did not generate an increase in the divorce rate. On the other hand, young marriages and the divorce rate simultaneously increased or decreased when there were increases in the fertility or the labor force participation rates. This outcome implied that the inverse association between age at marriage and divorce is not a causal relationship; rather divorces and marriages co-vary due to changes in labor force participation and fertility. The results hold when we use the unemployment rate for women as the labor market variable.

Suggested Citation

  • H. Naci Mocan, 1991. "Age at Marriage, Divorce, Fertility and Labor Force Participation of Women: a Time Series Perspective," Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, , vol. 4(1), pages 1-16, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:4:y:1991:i:1:p:1-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jie.sagepub.com/content/4/1/1.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:4:y:1991:i:1:p:1-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.