Unemployment and Family Formation among Young Men

Abstract

The relationship between domestic life and employment, clearly of great importance for women, has received little attention from sociologists as far as men are concerned. The paper investigates one aspect of this, namely the relationship between family formation and unemployment among young men. Using longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study, it provides evidence for the existence of direct causal links between family formation events and unemployment. After controlling for a variety of factors, marriage appears to reduce the probability of unemployment, and this is true even if the husband is in his teens when he marries. In contrast, marital breakdown and fathering one child raises the chances of unemployment. However fathers of two or more children have a higher probability of unemployment than childless men even before their first child is born, and this is even more marked for men with three or more children. This implies that by no means all of the correlation between family size and unemployment is explained by the fact that welfare benefits are related to the number of children: part at least appears to be due to prior unobserved factors which explain both high fertility and a raised probability of unemployment.

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