Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom

By Melissa S. Kearney, Riley Wilson. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We investigate whether an increase in the potential earnings of men leads to an increase in marriage and a reduction in nonmarital births by exploiting the positive economic shock associated with fracking in the 2000s. A reduced-form analysis reveals that in response to local-area fracking production, which increased wages and jobs for non-college-educated men, both marital and nonmarital birth rates increase, but marriage rates do not. The pattern of results is consistent with positive income effects on births but no associated increase in marriage. We contrast our findings to the Appalachian coal boom experience of the 1970s and 1980s.

Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2270af72fa630a522ce89edb90f2e3a6acd632f

Citations in the corpus

• Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change (2020, unknown): “This value is not significantly greater than the earnings growth expected by high school graduates (p = 0.185), but it is significantly greater than the expected earnings growth among men with some college or more, consistent with the findings of Bartik (2018) and Kearney and Wilson (2018).”