Employment Opportunities of Young Men and Family Formation
检验男性就业机会假说，即年轻男性就业机会减少是否导致结婚率下降和单亲家庭增加，基于家庭经济学视角回顾实证证据，并指出未来政策与研究方向。
Major shifts in family patterns have limited progress toward reducing poverty and narrowing black-white income differences. Much of the recent rise in female headship results from the rising number of never-married mothers. Despite a decline in the proportion of unmarried young women having babies, the drop in marriage rate has been so great that a rising proportion of children are under the care of never-married mothers. The absence of a parent dramatically increases current poverty of children. And, as Sara McLanahan (1988) shows, growing up in a poor family and in a mother-headed family (holding constant for income) increases the chances that a child will become poor as an adult. A long literature links the creation of mother-headed families with the inadequate financial resources of men. In 1965, the Moynihan report attributed the then-high rates of marital disruption among black families to the joblessness of black men, but warned that family dissolution might have reached a self-perpetuating stage unrelated to employment opportunities. Did the dramatic increases in one-parent families after 1965 reflect such a new, self-generating pattern? Or, were the job market problems of men the primary cause of the continuing decline in stable, intact American families? The most forceful, recent proponent of the male job opportunity hypothesis (hereafter MJO) is sociologist William J Wilson. Wilson (1987) argues that the declining number of employed black men relative to black women best explains the increasing proportions of black female-headed families. Clifford Johnson and Andrew Sum (1987) contend that declining real earnings of all young men was a major cause of their declining marriage rates. This paper examines the MJO hypothesis with respect to young men and family formation (marriage and becoming parents). I begin by viewing the MJO hypothesis from the perspective of the economics of the family. I then consider evidence from empirical studies of the MJO hypothesis. The conclusion notes future policy and research direc-