Poverty has been shown to negatively influence child health and development along a number of dimensions. For example, poverty-net of a variety of potentially confounding factors-is associated with increased neonatal and postneonatal mortality rates, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents or physical abuse/neglect, higher risk for asthma, and lower developmental scores in a range of tests at multiple ages.Despite the extensive literature available that addresses the relationship between poverty and child health and development, as yet there is no consensus on how poverty should be operationalized to reflect its dynamic nature. Perhaps more important is the lack of agreement on the set of controls that should be included in the modeling of this relationship in order to determine the "true" or net effect of poverty, independent of its cofactors. In this paper, we suggest a general model that should be adhered to when investigating the effects of poverty on children. We propose a standard set of controls and various measures of poverty that should be incorporated in any study, when possible. 463

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Center Discussion Papers are prelim:inary materials circulated to stirrulate discussion and critical conuient. References in publications to Discussion Papers should be cleared with the authors to protect the tentative character of these papers. Terms of use: Documents in CO...ITHENT AND THE MODERN UNION: ASSESSING THE LINK BETWEEN PREMARITAL COHABITATION AND SUBSEQUENT MARITAL STABILITY AbstractIn recent years, the incidence of premarital cohabitation has increased dramatically in many countries of Western Europe and in the United States. As cohabitation becomes more common arl experience, it is increasingly important to understand the links between cohabitation and other steps in the process of family formation and dissolution. We focus on the relationship between premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital stability, and analyze data from the 1981 Women in Sweden survey using a hazards model approach.Our results indicate that women who premaritally cohabit have almost 80 percent higher marital dissolution rates than those who do not cohabit. Women who live with their future husbands for over three years prior to marriage have over 50 percent higher dissolution rates than women who cohabit for shorter durations. Last, cohabitors and noncohabitors whose marriages have remained intact for eight years appear to have dissolution rates after that time that are identical. In sum, we provide evidence that strongly suggests that the higher marital dissolution rates of cohabitors reflects their weaker commitment to the institution of marriage.2

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Our purpose in this paper is first, to examine patterns of first marriage among black and white women in the United States, and then, to assess the various factors that underlie these patterns. Three major differences exist between the first marriage patterns of black and white women: lower proportions of blacks marry than whites, the proportion of women who ever marry has declined substantially across cohorts of black women but comparatively modestly across cohorts of white women, and increased education is associated negatively, if only slightly, with the probability of ever marrying among white women, but is associated positively among black women. The observed racial divergence of marriage patterns is demonstrated to be consistent with three factors differentially experienced by blacks and whites: the marriage squeeze, labor market success, and out-of-wedlock childbearing. Terms of use: Documents inOur a.nalysis of the marriage squeeze indicates that, given the traditional range of age differences between spouses, there is a greater mismatch in terms of sheer numbers of women and men among blacks than among whites for cohorts born prior to the late 1950s. Along economic lines, we find that an individual's employment status is positively associated with the propensity to marry and that the labor market situation of less-educated young black men and women is generally poor and has deteriorated significantly with the passage of time in comparison to other groups in the United States. Last, we provide evidence that having an out-of-wedlock child at an early age is strongly negatively associated with the likelihood that a woman will ultimately marry.

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This paper attempts to answer a series of questions regarding the interaction of income and birth weight across generations. First, does the effect of the income of a mother during her pregnancy on her infant's birth weight depend on the family's birth weight history (genetic predisposition)? Second, does the effect of low birth weight status on adult life chances depend on income during early childhood? These questions have implications for the way we envision the biological and social worlds as interacting across generations. To address these issues, this study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, survey years 1968 through 1992. Results of sibling comparisons (family-fixed-effects models) demonstrate that maternal income has a significant impact on birth weight for those infants who are already at high risk hereditarily (i.e., who have a low birth weight parent). However, it is not clear whether income acts as a developmental buffer for low birth weight infants as their lives progress. These findings suggest the existence of biosocial interactions between hereditary predisposition and socioeconomic environment.

We document a negative association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage in the United States, controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences. Nonmarital childbearing does not appear to be driven by low expectations of future marriage. Rather, it tends to be an unexpected and unwanted event, whose effects on a woman's subsequent likelihood of first marriage are negative on balance. We find that women who bear a child outside marriage and who receive welfare have a particularly low probability of marrying subsequently, although there is no evidence that AFDC recipients have lower expectations of marriage. In addition, we find no evidence that stigma associated with nonmarital childbearing plays an important role in this process or that the demands of children significantly reduce unmarried mothers' time for marriage market activities.

Age-specific population growth rates were introduced to demographic analysis in earlier work by Bennett and Horiuchi (1981) and Preston and Coale (1982). In this paper, we derive a method which uses these growth rates to transform what may be a set of incompletely recorded deaths by age into a life table that accurately reflects the true mortality experience of the population under study. The method does not rely on the assumption of stability and, for example, in contrast to intercensal cohort survival techniques, is simple to implement when presented with nontraditional intercensal interval lengths. Thus we can obtain mortality estimates for less developed countries with defective data, despite departures from stability. Further, we assess the sensitivity of the method to violations in various assumptions underlying the procedure: error in estimated growth rates, existence of non-zero net intercensal migration, age dependence in the completeness of death registration, and misreporting of age at death and age in the population. We demonstrate the use of the method in an application to data referring to Argentine females during the period 1960 to 1970.