Do Married Parents Improve Childrens Schooling and Adult Income?
Growing up with married parents has long been correlated with a litany of positive child outcomes—a fact often cited by supporters of policies that promote marriage.32 Many recent studies take into account the effects of family background to try to establish more closely the causal relationship between parents’ marital status and children’s outcomes. That analytical approach sometimes diminishes the link between parents’ marital status and children’s outcomes—a finding often cited by observers skeptical of policies that promote marriage. Little research estimates the relationship between parents’ marital status and their children’s adult income. Moreover, researchers have no reliable way to estimate causal models of the effect of parents’ marital status, and they have not been consistent in defining and measuring marital status. As a result there is little good empirical basis for estimating the likely outcome of policies that encourage marriage. The one study that does estimate the re
