This paper uses the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey to describe how families with children in Los Angeles combine economic resources. I ask whether immigrant and non-immigrant mothers pursue different family economic strategies and whether they differ in the short-term stability of their income-generating activities. I ask what individual and family characteristics, other than immigration status, account for differences in strategies and stability. I find that the families of immigrant mothers are more likely than those of native-born mothers to rely only on income from employment rather than combining resources, a difference not explained by differences in human capital and other individual characteristics. Additionally, there is no evidence of differences in family strategies among naturalized citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants. Mothers who are undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens are less likely to make transitions in their income generating activities than mothers who are native-born or documented immigrants.
Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of U.S. white and African American women. We examine how completed fertility varies by women’s education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education gradient on fertility comes largely from unintended childbearing, and it is not explained by childbearing desires or opportunity cost, the two common explanations in past literature. Less educated women want no more children than the more educated, so this factor explains none of their higher completed fertility. Less educated women have lower wages, but wages have little of the negative effect on fertility predicted by economic theories of opportunity cost. We propose three other potential mechanisms linking low education and unintended childbearing, focusing on access to contraception and abortion, relational and economic uncertainty, and consistency in the behaviors necessary to avoid unintended pregnancies. Our work highlights the need to incorporate these mechanisms into future research.
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