Unmarried Fertility, Crime, and Social Stigma
研究发现非婚生育率与未来谋杀和财产犯罪正相关，但社会污名程度会改变这一关系：1940-50年代低质量婚姻中的孩子可能比单亲家庭更糟，而1960年代后许多有益孩子的婚姻被放弃。
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.