Murphy Brown Revisited: Human Capital, Search, and Nonmarital Childbearing among Educated Women

Lucie Schmidt, University of Michigan

Nonmarital childbearing among college-educated women has received little attention, despite substantial increases over the past thirty years. Existing models cannot provide explanations for nonmarital childbearing among women at the top of the educational distribution. I develop a search model of marriage and fertility decisions that can explain nonmarital childbearing at all levels of education. This model predicts that nonmarital first births should increase with age among women with high levels of human capital. It also suggests that worsening marriage market conditions should affect nonmarital birth probabilities for all groups of women. For women with low levels of education, my results, consistent with existing research, confirm the importance of worsening marriage market conditions. Unlike previous work, the model also captures key features of nonmarital childbearing among educated women. Among this group, my results suggest that the finite nature of fertility is crucial, leading to increases in nonmarital childbearing propensities among women over the age of 35.