TY  - BOOK
AU  - Kendall,Todd D.
AU  - Tamura,Robert
TI  - Unmarried fertility, crime, and social stigma
SN  - 00222186
AV  - HB73 JOU 
PY  - 2010///
CY  - Chicago
PB  - University of Chicago Press
KW  - Childbirth
KW  - Criminal arrests
KW  - Fertility rates
KW  - Murder
KW  - Parents
KW  - Property crimes
KW  - Rape
KW  - Single status
KW  - Social stigma
N2  - Children born to unmarried parents may receive lower human capital investments, leading to higher levels of criminal activity as adults. Therefore, unmarried fertility may be positively associated with future crime. Alternatively, in an environment in which social stigma attached to nonmarital fertility is high, many low‐match‐quality parents will marry, and children reared in these families may actually be worse off than if their parents had not married. We explore these effects empirically, finding that over the long run unmarried fertility is positively associated with murder and property crime but that the degree of social stigma has affected this relationship. For instance, our results suggest that some marriages in the 1940s and 1950s were of such low quality that the children involved would have been better off in single‐parent households; however, this finding is reversed for marriages in the 1960s and thereafter—many marriages that would have benefited children were forgone
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1086/596116
ER  -