Brief: Joblessness and Unemployment: A Review of the Literature

The NCOFF Brief Series summarizes literature reviews that were presented during the Fathers and Families Roundtable Series. This series brought together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to examine issues surrounding the NCOFF Core Learnings, or findings thought to be essential in working with fathers. This brief describes the Joblessness and Employment literature review, which was written by Patrick L. Mason of University of Notre Dame. NCOFF receives core funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, with special project funding from the Ford and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundations.

Key Findings

• The African American Structural Model provides the most appropriate framework for understanding current changes and future challenges confronting African American families. This model predicts that increases in men's economic potential will increase father involvement, fathering behaviors, and the marriage rate, while decreasing the probability of divorce.

   

• Mate availability (i.e., the supply of marriageable men) is an important economic variable in accounting for the difference in marriage rates between African American and White women.

   

• AFDC does not encourage divorce or premarital childbirth. More broadly, there is no evidence that public welfare policy encourages an "underclass culture." For the most part, AFDC appears to increase the economic well-being of low-income families, as the program was designed to do.

   

• Increases in female independence--as indicated by increased female wages, earnings, education, and employment--increase the probability of marriage and decrease the probability of divorce.

   

• Education increases the likelihood of marriage, decreases the chances of divorce, and decreases the chances of premarital births among teens.

  Recommendation for Research

   

• Future social science research should determine precisely how competing racial and class interests shape public policy and group action.

  Recommendation for Practice and Policy

   

• A primary policy or action objective should be to ameliorate systemic barriers, e.g., chronic unemployment and underemployment among African American men and youth, that reduce the feasability of marriage and increase the probability of divorce among African American men and women.

  Joblessness and Unemployment: A Review of the Literature

  This literature review examines the effects of limited economic opportunities for African American men on transitions in African American family structure and marital stability. Specifically, the author of the review seeks to address four questions: (1) How does male formal economic potential influence family/household structure? (2) How does male formal economic potential influence involvement in the informal and illegal sector of the economy? (3) What is the nature of the interaction between informal/illegal sector involvement and family/household structure? (4) Which economic policies, group actions, and individual strategies can increase male economic potential in the formal sector, increase African American conjugal family stability, and decrease African American male involvement in the illegal, nonformal economic sector, viz., drug dealing and violent crime?

  The author advances the African American Structural Model as the best framework for answering these questions and for understanding in general the relationship between African American men's economic opportunities and African American family structure. This model is contrasted to the New Household Economics Model, the prevailing theory used to transitions in family structure. Finally, the review provides insight into the role of family structure into the crime, unemployment, and race debate.

  In the first section, the author gives a brief descriptive overview of recent changes in marital status, marriage opportunity, fertility rates, and the economic well-being of families. Drawing heavily on data from the U.S. Bureau of Commerce's Current Population Reports and from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the author finds a significant increase in the proportion of births to unmarried African American women. He attributes this increase to two sources: (1) the dramatic decline in marriage of African Americans and (2) the decreasing ratio of fertility rates of married women to fertility rates of unmarried women.

  The second section compares the two models that have generated the most widely accepted theoretical explanations of transitions in the African American family structure, the African American Structural Model, and the New Household Economics Model. The African American Structural Model refers to a body of work that argues that the rise in female-headed households and the rise in the proportion of never-married African Americans are strongly determined by the economic marginalization of African American males. African American men can be marginalized by suffering premature death due to poor health, crime, or accidents (from their concentration in unsafe neighborhoods and hazardous work environments), by being involuntarily institutionalized (in prisons or mental hospitals), by participating in illegal activities, or simply by earning insufficient wages to be considered marriageable.

  In the African American Structural Model, mate availability is not strictly a demographic variable but also an economic variable, determined at least in part by macroeconomic cycles and trends, macrosocial policies, and microeconomic decisionmaking. For instance, limited legal earnings opportunities are found to be the primary determinant of drug dealing (Myers, 1992) which leads to higher incarceration rates. According to a sophisticated statistical model cited by the author (Darity and Myers, 1995a, 1990), an increase in homicides or the incarceration rate will decrease mate availability. This is an example of how marginalization reduces the supply of marriageable mates and contributes to the rise in female-headed households. Another important tenet of the African American Structural Model is that strong neighborhoods produce strong families, and proponents of this perspective suggest that declining informal ties within African American neighborhoods may play a large role in the decline of marriage.

  The author contrasts the African American Structural Model to the New Household Economics Model derived from Gary Becker's A Treatise on the Family (1991). Becker argues that individuals will marry if the expected benefits of marriage exceed the expected benefits of remaining single. That is, the individual's share of the married household output must exceed the unmarried individual's output. This perspective suggests that there are strong economic incentives for most adults to marry. With equitable trading (sharing), both partners can raise their standard of living. For instance, if one partner specializes in housework while the other specializes in market work, the gain for both, or the household output, will exceed the output of two otherwise identical single persons. An efficient marriage market will positively sort mates so that, for example, highly educated men will tend to marry highly educated women, and the least productive men and women are most likely to be unmarried. The same argument is applied to childbearing. The demand for children declines with increases in the relative price of conceiving and rearing a child. By this logic, AFDC encourages fertility because it lowers the cost of rearing a child for the parent. Another implication of this perspective, according to the author, is that parents with higher levels of income will have fewer children and invest more resources in them than parents with less income.

  The author then reviews empirical literature which has offered four possible reasons for transformations in African-American family structure: (1) the marginalization of African American males, (2) increases in female independence, (3) the effects of AFDC and other public policies, and (4) increases in the amount of schooling for both men and women. The female independence hypothesis suggests that increases in female labor force participation or higher wages relative to males will be associated with lower fertility and women's lower inclination to marry. Increased schooling for women is also thought to delay the age of first marriage and delay the age of first childbirth.

  The African American Structural Model and the New Household Economics Model differ greatly in their view of the effects of marginalization of African American males and the effects of AFDC on the family. The Structural Model predicts that economic marginalization of males will decrease the pool of marriage-eligible males and increase the number of female-headed households. By contrast, the New Household Economics Model assumes that all men and women are in the market at all times. In this model, males are not removed from the pool; some are simply less competitive at finding and retaining mates. This perspective implies that African American males will have a higher marriage rate than African American females and that African American males will have a higher marriage rate than White males--all factors being equal. The two models also predict different effects from AFDC and other transfer payments: whereas the New Household Economics Model argues that AFDC encourages divorce and nonmarriage among pregnant women and pushes the odds of pregnancy resolution away from abortion and toward live birth, the African American Structural Model argues that transfer payments simply keep families out of poverty.

  After discussing the empirical findings that address these hypotheses, the author concludes that the results on marriage and divorce are more consistent with the African American Structural Model than with the New Household Economics Model. A significant problem with the New Household Economics Model is that it considers sex ratio (a measure of mate availability) only as a demographic variable and not as an economic variable. To support his argument that sex ratio is also an economic variable, the author cites evidence that the African American male marriage rate increases with increases in earnings (Wood, 1995) and that the probability of a wife divorcing declines with increases in husbands' earnings (Hoffman and Duncan, 1995).

  In addition, the author argues that evidence cited in this review contradicts the female independence hypothesis: for most women, increases in education, employment, and earnings increase the probability of marriage (Mare and Winship, 1991; Hoffman and Duncan, 1995). Although current enrollment in school delays the age of first marriage, the probability of marriage rises with years of schooling among persons not currently enrolled in school (Mare and Winship, 1991).

  Further, the author finds no empirical evidence to support the claim that AFDC encourages divorce or discourages marriage (Wood, 1995; Lichter et al., 1992; Darity and Myers, 1995a). The lower rate of abortion among African Americans reflects cultural preferences rather than a response to public policy. For example, African Americans tend to have very strong religious convictions which tend to reduce the probability of their choosing abortion as a pregnancy alternative. The author also does not find evidence that public policy has created an environment that encourages irresponsible behavior. AFDC has been shown to have no impact on young, pregnant African American women's decisions to marry, although AFDC increases the probability that White women will remain unmarried prior to birth. Teenage, out-of-wedlock births have a negative correlation with parents' income and the presence of a father in the home (Crane, 1991).

  Finally, some characteristics of neighborhoods have been found to be related to family structure. In particular, an increase in the proportion of professional and managerial workers in a neighborhood is correlated negatively with the incidence of teen births (Crane, 1991). White teens living in the less affluent neighborhoods of large cities have birth rates comparable to those of African American teens. The socioeconomic status of schools appears relatively unimportant for African American teen births but has a larger impact for Whites (Mayer, 1991). For African American teens, parents' socioeconomic status is more important than the socioeconomic status of a teen's school.

  The African American Structural Model is part of a larger perspective which emphasizes the role of class divisions in American society. The author outlines how his research might be extended to address the issues of class and culture. He concludes by contrasting the structural theory of changes in family structure, which emphasizes mate availability, racial discrimination, social class, and the unique cultural heritage of African Americans to the sociological tradition, which asserts that African American family life is "pathological." He notes that while Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (1965) infamous report on the African American family minimized the impact of economic circumstances, blaming instead the deterioration of the African American family for the deterioration of African American society, the bulk of empirical evidence tends to support the opposite causal direction as outlined in the African American Structural Model.

   

  References

  Becker, G. (1991). A treatise on the family (Enlarged ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Crane, J. (1991). Effects of neighborhoods on dropping out of school and teenage childbearing. In C. Jencks & P. E. Peterson (Eds.), The urban underclass, (pp. 299-320). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

  Darity, W., Jr. (1983). Reaganomics and the Black community. In S. Weintraub & M. Goodstein (Eds.), Reaganomics in the stagflation economy, (pp. 59-77). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  Darity, W., Jr. & Myers, S., Jr. (1995a). Family structure and the marginalization of Black men: Policy implications. In M. B. Tucker & C. Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), The decline in marriage among African Americans: Causes, consequences, and policy implications, (pp.171-203). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

  Darity, W., Jr. & Myers, S., Jr. (1995b). The widening gap: A summary and synthesis of the debate on increasing inequality. Unpublished manuscript, University of Minnesota.

  Duncan, G. & Hoffman, S. (1991). Teenage underclass behavior and subsequent poverty: Have the rules changed? In C. Jencks & P. E. Peterson (Eds.),The urban underclass, (pp. 155-174). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

  Hoffman, S. & Duncan, G. (1995). The effect of incomes, wages, and AFDC benefits on marital disruption. Journal of Human Resources, 30, 19-41.

  Lichter, D., McLaughlin, D., Kephart, G., & Landry, D. (1992). Race and the retreat from marriage: A shortage of marriageable men? American Sociological Review, 57, 781-799.

  Mare, R. & Winship, C. (1991). Socioeconomic change and the decline of marriage for Blacks and Whites. In C. Jencks and P. E. Peterson (Eds.), The urban underclass, (pp. 175-202). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

  Mayer, S. (1991). How much does a high school's racial and socioeconomic mix affect graduation and teenage fertility rates? In C. Jencks and P. E. Peterson (Eds.), The urban underclass, (pp. 321-341). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

  Moynihan, D. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor.

  U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1979). The social and economic status of the Black population in the United States: An historical overview, 1790-1978. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P20-480 (1995). The Black population of the United States: March 1994 and 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics (1995). Vital Statistics of the United States, 1990: Volume I-Natality. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics (1986). Advance report of final natality statistics, 1984. Monthly Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 35 Supplement. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  Wood, R. (1995). Marriage rates and marriageable men: A test of the Wilson hypothesis. Journal of Human Resources, 30, 163-193.