- A Brookings Institution study by George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen, "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States" (August 1996). This paper was earlier published in May 1996 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
(Akerlof is a co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. Yellen, also an economist, is currently Vice Chair of the Federal Reserves' Board of Governors. The Brookings Institution is a center-left think tank in Washington.)
The study focuses in the end on welfare policy. One may argue with their policy conclusions, but one of the main descriptive or analytical points pertains to the "reproductive technology shock" theory:
Around 1970, the United States experienced a reproductive technology shock. The legalization of abortion and dramatic increase in the availability of contraception gave women the tools to control the number and timing of their children. Over the ensuing 25 years, however, there have been huge increases in the number of single-parent families headed by unmarried mothers. The usual economic explanations (welfare benefits and the declining availability of good jobs) explain only a small fraction of the change. In our view, it was the technology shock itself that, by eroding the age-old custom of shotgun marriage, paradoxically raised out-of-wedlock birth rates instead of lowering them. ...
In the late 1960s and very early 1970s (well before Roe v. Wade in January 1973) many major states, including New York and California, liberalized their abortion laws. At about the same time it became easier for unmarried people to obtain contraceptives. In July 1970 the Massachusetts law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people was declared unconstitutional. We have found that this rather sudden increase in the availability of both abortion and contraception (we call it a reproductive technology shock) is deeply implicated in the increase in out-of-wedlock births. Although many observers expected liberalized abortion and contraception to lead to fewer out-of-wedlock births, in fact the opposite happened because of the erosion in the custom of "shotgun marriages."
Akerlof and Yellen's study is an economic attempt to move beyond temporal or sequential correlation and to some measure of causation. Reproductive technological changes regarding contraception (including the birth control pill and abortion), in their view, prompted, not just accompanied, changes in social moral standards and entailed marital behavior. These changes have had broad economic and societal repercussions.
