Is a Bad strongEconomystrong Good for Marriage The Relationship between.pdf

Is a Bad Economy Good for Marriage? The Relationship between Macroeconomic Conditions and Marital Stability from 1998-2009 Kristen Harknett University of Pennsylvania Daniel Schneider Princeton University January 2012 Kristen Harknett, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Sociology, 3718 Locust Walk, 271 McNeil Building, Philadelphia, PA 19104, harknett@. Daniel Schneider, Princeton University, Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton, NJ, 08544, djschnei@. The authors contributed equally to this work and are listed alphabetically. This project was supported by the National Poverty Center using funds received from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, grant number 1 U01 A The authors thank the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through grants R01HD36916, R01HD39135, R01HD40421, and R01HD066054 as well as a consortium of private foundations for their support of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Schneider thanks the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Princeton University for financial support. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meetings of APPAM, and the ASA. The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Sara McLanahan and Irv Garfinkel as well as from seminar participants at Columbia and Princeton. Jo n Roth and Melanie Wright provided excellent research assistance. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and should not be construed as representing th