Note to Some Intrepid Journalist

It’s not exactly a secret that Janet Yellen will most likely become the next chairman (chairperson?) of the Federal Reserve. Yellen has a long and distinguished career which includes stints at the Fed, the Council of Economic Advisors and many years in academia, first at Harvard and later at Berkeley. She’s also married to George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Here’s a listing of her articles and academic papers going back nearly forty years. It’s an impressive body of work. She was addressing the topic of long-term unemployment long before that became a topic of conservation among policy elites.

There is, however, one paper that Yellen wrote that seems quite different from much of her other work. In 1996, she and Akerlof wrote, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States.” I believe that’s the only time she has addressed that subject in depth.

Abstract:

This paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the United States. The decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out-of-wedlock first births. Several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand-loom weavers, both victims of changing technology. Mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described. This technology-shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job-shortage theories of the feminization of poverty.

At the time the paper was written, that was a hot topic. There was a lot of talk about the root causes of poverty and what to do about welfare. That year, Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act. Well, 1996 was a long time ago and now we know a lot more about effects of out-of-wedlock births.

I haven’t read the paper, but I’m curious…were they right?

Posted by on May 7th, 2013 at 2:58 pm


The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.