TY - JOUR AU - Lundberg, Shelly AU - Pollak, Robert A TI - Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the U.S., 1950-2010 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19413 PY - 2013 Y2 - September 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19413 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19413 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19413.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Shelly Lundberg Department of Economics University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Tel: (805) 893-8619 E-Mail: slundberg@ucsb.edu Robert A. Pollak Washington University in St. Louis Arts and Sciences and the Olin Business School Campus Box 1133 1 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 Tel: 314/935-4918 Fax: 314/935-6359 E-Mail: pollak@wustl.edu M1 - published as Shelly Lundberg, Robert A. Pollak. "Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the United States, 1950–2010," in Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, and Robert A. Margo, editors, "Human Capital in History: The American Record" University of Chicago Press (2014) M3 - presented at "Human Capital and History: The American Record", December 7-8, 2012 AB - Since 1950 the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women overtook and surpassed that of men and the ratio of men's to women's wage rates fell, traditional patterns of gender specialization in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited independence and potential mismatch. Cohabitation became an acceptable living arrangement for all groups, but cohabitation serves different functions among different groups. The poor and less educated are much more likely to rear children in cohabitating relationships. The college educated typically cohabit before marriage, but they marry before conceiving children and their marriages are relatively stable. We argue that different patterns of childrearing are the key to understanding class differences in marriage and parenthood, not an unintended by-product of it. Marriage is the commitment mechanism that supports high levels of investment in children and is hence more valuable for parents adopting a high-investment strategy for their children. ER -