Economic Woman

Yesterday afternoon, as I sat in a library cafeteria approximating volume by cylindrical shells (calculus exam in t-minus 8 days!) I was distracted by the couple beside me. They were arguing over whether to get married. He wanted to get hitched and move to Chicago; she said that he was too sexist to spend her life with. Apparently, he had said at some point said that given the choice, he would prefer a son to a daughter, because a son would be more likely to provide for him in his old age.

A bias towards male offspring is something that we tend to associate with other countries, but this paper, by Gordon B. Dahl and Enrico Moretti at Berkeley, shows that “the demand for sons” is alive and well in the United States. They find that first-born daughters are less likely to end up living with their fathers than first-born sons. I’m going to quote at length from the abstract because it is so interesting.

Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely to marry.Strikingly, we also find evidence that the gender of a child in utero affects shotgun marriages. Among women who have taken an ultrasound test during pregnancy, mothers who have a girl are less likely to be married at delivery than mothers who have a boy. Second, parents who have first-born girls are significantly more likely to be divorced. Third, after a divorce, fathers are much more likely to obtain custody of sons compared to daughters. These three factors have serious negative income and educational consequences for affected children.

Hat tip to Freakonomics for the paper.

Here’s a beautiful illustration of what I’m trying to do. Feministing and Freakonomics are both posting about that report on the cost of divorce. Feminists have long criticized marriage incentives and the reasoning behind them – Feministing’s take hits home as always, pointing out the “family values” sponsors of the report.

Studies like these are not just about promoting marriage, of course, they’re about promoting traditional marriages. And the idea that women don’t need a job (just a man) has [been] hurting women welfare recipients for far too long.

Great. Now let’s look at the social science. Over at Freakonomics, Justin Wolfers’ fantastic post takes us through the numbers. It turns out that on average, women are a little better off financially after a divorce – the “marriage movement” doesn’t take into account that increase in tax revenue. And there’s more.

The U.S. tax system is structured so that when poor single mothers marry men with higher incomes, in most cases, the total tax paid by husband and wife would fall. Yet this isn’t counted. Those poor single women aren’t robbing us of tax revenue, they are actually paying more than if they were married!

To be honest, Wolfers’ post is a gift – I can think of very little to add. You should check it out, and while you’re at it poke through some of his other writing on the economics of the family.