Still waiting for Mister Right? Asymmetric information, abortion laws and the timing of marriage

Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that more liberal abortion laws should lead to a decrease in marriage rates among young women as ‘shotgun weddings’ are no longer necessary. Empirical evidence from the United States lends support to that hypothesis. This article presents an alternative theory of abortion access and marriage based on the cost of search which suggests that more liberal abortion laws may actually promote young marriage. An empirical examination of marriage data from Eastern Europe shows that countries that liberalized their abortion laws saw an increase in marriage rates among nonteenage women.

Keywords:

• abortion
• marriage

JEL Classification:

• J12
• J13
• K00

Acknowledgements

For useful comments and advice, we thank Doug Staiger, Ian Smith, Laura Argys, Michael Katz, Naci Mocan and seminar participants at the University of Oregon, the University of St Andrews and Reed College.

Notes

¹ Chiappori and Oreffice (2008) argue that for Akerlof et al.'s theory to hold, it must be the case that a significant proportion of the male population in the US chose to remain single over this time period, but would have decided (or been forced) to marry had legal abortion not been available. To examine empirically whether legalization of abortion significantly increased the probability of singlehood in the male population, they use data on males aged 15 to 50 from the Current Population Survey March Supplements 1968–1980 and regress a male singlehood dummy on age, education, race and fixed effects by year and state, as well as an abortion legalization dummy for the different states. They find that the abortion dummy is not statistically significant and the coefficient has a negative sign.

² The implicit assumption here is that the woman is in control of her own fertility. While it is true that men can, through the use of contraception, control fertility as well, condoms in the United States make up only 16% of contraceptive use. The vast majority of contraceptive use is through methods that are often undetectable by men at the time of intercourse (Mosher and Jones, 2010).

³ The 12 countries are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovak Republic.

⁴ The data on abortion laws were provided by Doug Staiger and Phillip Levine who have examined the effect of these laws on a range of fertility outcomes in Eastern Europe (Levine and Staiger, 2004).

⁵ This categorization is taken from Levine and Staiger (2004).

⁶ Levine and Staiger (2004) note that it is difficult to obtain data for separate regions within a country, for example, the former German Democratic Republic and the former Czechoslovakia. Separate estimates for the German eastern regions of the level of GDP were able to be obtained, but for previous years, we follow Levine and Staiger (2004) and calculate the level of GDP using the more recent data combined with CIA estimates of GDP growth rates in earlier years. Inflation data for 1992 onwards were taken from the German Statistical Office and 1980 to 1989 data were obtained from CIA estimates. Data for 1990 and 1991 are missing. For the Czech and Slovak republics, separate GDP figures over the period 1984 to 1997 were obtained from the World Bank, but for previous years, we again follow Levine and Staiger (2004) and assign the GDP growth rates from the combined Czechoslovakia to the 1984 levels of GDP to project backward. It is also assumed that inflation in the two republics were the same prior to their separation.

⁷ Some countries and years have missing data for these macroeconomic variables, even using the CIA estimates. To include these countries in the analysis, we follow Levine and Staiger (2004) and add dummy variables for both GDP and inflation measures to indicate whether or not these data are missing.

⁸ Empirical evidence from the United States suggests that the adoption of unilateral divorce laws by many states in the 1970s has led to a significant and permanent decline in marriage rates (see Brinig and Grafton, 1994; Rasul, 2003).