A JOINT MODEL OF MARITAL CHILDBEARING AND MARITAL DISRUPTION

Married couples with children appear to be less likely to end their ma rriages than childless couples, especially when the children are young . Although this suggests that children affect the chances that their p arents will divorce, the process may not be so simple: the chances tha t the marriage will last also may affect couples' willingness to make the commitment to the marriage implied by having children. This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to test the h ypothesis that the risk of disruption faced by a married woman affects the chances that she will conceive and bear a child. The model used t akes into account the simultaneous relationships between marital disso lution and marital fertility by including the hazard of disruption as a predictor of timing and likelihood of marital conception, and by inc luding the results of previous fertility decisions as predictors of di sruption of the marriage. We find that the hazard of disruption has st rong negative effects on the hazard of marital childbearing, lengtheni ng the intervals between births and decreasing the chances that a chil d will be born. This effect appears to be strongest for women who have had at least one child, either before or during the current marriage, although it is also large for childless women. Explicitly including t he hazard of disruption in models of marital childbearing has sizable and important effects on many predictors of fertility.