Marriage and Fertility
The interactions between marriage and fertility, human capital investments, and health are multi-faceted. This session will investigate these linkages in multiple directions over the life cycle, with a special focus on drawing causal inferences, by exploiting quasi-experimental methods and natural experiments, and on drawing health policy implications. The first presentation explores the link between human capital and early fertility-related behavior, including sexual initiation, marriage, and birth, for a developing country. It exploits Mexico’s educational reform, which extended compulsory schooling and led to the construction of new secondary schools, in order to isolate the causal effect of schooling. The second presentation shifts the lens to older adults, and studies how health shocks impact marital dissolution and coping behaviors based on long-spanning longitudinal information. It extends the literature by assessing the mechanisms underlying these effects, differentially modeling them across both genders in a household bargaining context, and in the process shedding light on the well-documented health benefits of marriage. The third presentation exploits plausibly exogenous variation in public healthcare coverage in the U.S., afforded by differential expansions to Medicaid between 1985-1996. It considers how increases in such public insurance eligibility among pregnant women may have impacted their health investments such as smoking, drinking, and pregnancy-related weight gain, which in turn affect both maternal and infant health. The results have important implications for assessing the impact of expanded insurance coverage (as is slated to occur in the U.S. under the Affordable Care Act), and designing provisions to counteract potential ex ante moral hazard.