Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent living arrangement in the United States. Although the effects of living in a cohabiting arrangement on child well-being are not fully understood, the literature on children growing up in cohabiting families suggests that they have poorer developmental outcomes than do those growing up in married-parent families or in single-parent families. We use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to see if cohabiting couples with children spend their income on a different set of goods (i.e., have a different distribution of expenditure) than either married parents or single parents. Using a variety of analytical methods, we find that cohabiting couples spend a substantially larger share of their total expenditure on alcohol and tobacco than do either married-parent families or single parents. Cohabiting couples with children also spend less on health care and less on education than do married parents.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago in its series Working Papers with number
0204.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)