Income Inequality and Early Non-Marital Childbearing: An Economic Exploration of the "Culture of Despair"

Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine

NBER Working Paper No. 17157
Issued in June 2011

---- Acknowledgements -----

This paper was originally circulated as "Early Non-marital Childbearing and the 'Culture of Despair'". The authors thank Liz Ananat, Judy Hellerstein, and Serkan Ozbeklik for comments on an earlier version. We also acknowledge helpful comments from seminar participants at the Harris School at the University of Chicago, the Harvard Labor Workshop, Middlebury College, the Maryland Population Research Center, University of British Columbia, Wharton, University of Wisconsin IRP, Northwestern IPR, and participants at the conferences, “Public Policy and the Economics of Fertility” at Mount Holyoke and “Labor Markets, Children, and Families” at the University of Stavanger. We thank Erin Moody and Lisa Dettling for very capable research assistance. We are grateful to Christopher Rogers at the National Center for Health Statistics for facilitating our access to confidential data. Any views expressed are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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