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744 journal of political economy TABLE 3 State Laws and Pill Use among Never-Married Female Youths in the National Survey of Young Women, 1971 Dependent Variable: 1 p Ever Taken the Birth Control Pill 15–19 Years Old 17–19 Years Old All (1) Mean of dependent variable State law (1pnonrestrictive for (.00870) .0232 minors) Age variables: 15 .140 (.210) 16 .119 (.0186) 17 .0946 (.0163) 18 .0618 Sexually Active* (2) All (3) Sexually Active (4) 17–19 Years Old and Attends College All (5) Sexually Active (6) .0652 .245 .106 .304 .145 .406 .0807 (.0280) .259 (.0641) .175 (.0521) .106 (.0443) .0941 (.0334) .0422 (.0153) .0730 (.0202) .0544 (.0170) (.0618) Education variables: College .0680 (.0177) .109 (.0372) .0837 (.0470) .0836 (.0373) .0701 (.0367) .114 (.0491) .0602 (.0293) .128 (.0889) .103 (.146) .0632 (.0664) .177 (.0430) Currently attends school .0820 (.0158) .0695 (.0364) .0714 (.0189) .0845 (.0405) .211 (.0846) Catholic .0126 .0272 .0210 .0426 .0256 (.00845) (.0287) (.0149) (.0374) (.0334) African-American .0775 .0656 .101 .0405 .0276 (.0112) (.0284) (.0193) (.0379) (.0505) Observations 4,211 1,314 2,226 890 647 245 2 R .0854 .113 .0645 .0856 .0558 .103 .323 (.161) .0804 (.0819) .186 (.0958) Source.—National Survey of Young Women, 1971. Note.—Standard errors are in parentheses. Ordinary least squares estimates are given and are almost identical to the implied slopes estimated by a logit and evaluated at the sample means. All regressions use the NSYW71 sampling weights. State law is coded one if, in 1971, the state allowed minors (16 years and older) to receive birth control services and devices without parental consent. There were 12 states in that group; see col. 5 of table 2. Dummy variables are included in cols. 1 and 2 for grades 8 and above, and dummy variables are included for census divisions in all columns. About 3 percent of the sample in cols. 5 and 6 were not attending college at the time of the survey but reported that they attended college. * “Sexually active” means that the individual had ever had sexual intercourse. (see Bailey [1997] for a case study of Kansas). Thus pill use by young, single women began to rise about a year before the sea change in the laws regarding the age of majority. II. Frameworks to Understand the Effect of the Pill on Marriage and Career We have established that the birth control pill diffused rapidly among young, unmarried women beginning in the late 1960s and that the
power of the pill 745 timing was related to changes in state laws and a growing notion that young people could make their own decisions. But how could the diffusion of the pill have affected professional career investments by young women? The diffusion of the pill among young, single women may have altered career decisions through two routes: direct and indirect. By the direct effect of the pill, we mean the reduction in the cost of marriage delay. The pill makes marriage delay and thus career investment cheaper, and women with greater “career ability” become more attractive marriage partners. By the indirect effect of the pill, we mean the lowering of the cost of a career through the marriage market. This effect, in contrast, operates through a thickening of the marriage market for those who delay marriage and leads to better matches for career women and some others. To simplify the discussion, we formally model the direct effect and give the intuition behind the indirect effect. 31 Consider a cohort of n women and n men, each initially unmarried, in a two-period context with no discounting. Members of each sex agree on the ranking of the other in terms of marriage partners. Each man brings Y i (e.g., income), known to all, to marriage. Each woman brings N j (e.g., nurturing), known to all, to marriage and can also contribute a j through a career; a j is treated as a household public good. We make the simplifying assumption that career investment is not possible if a woman marries in period 1. Marriage delay reduces utility by l for each partner. The reduction is assumed to be the same for all men and women and l p l 0 prior to the introduction of the pill. We interpret l as the utility lost from abstinence as well as from forgone home production and term l the “impatience factor” to encompass both. The attributes Y, N, and a are distributed among the n men and women such that Y ∼ [Y, Y ], N ∼ [N, N ], and a ∼ [a, a], where Y, N, a 1 0. The distributions of Y, N, and a are known by all participants, and each individual’s attributes are perfectly observable. Consider a match between male i and female j. If they marry in period 1, then the male gets N j and the female gets Y i . If they delay marriage to period 2 and the woman invests in a career, then the male gets Nj aj l 0 and the female gets Yi aj l 0. If aj 1 l 0, then both benefit from delay and the woman will invest in a career in period 1. If, instead, a j ! l 0, they marry in period 1 and the woman has no career. Since there are no disagreements, we can unambiguously match men and women on the basis of their value in marriage to the other sex. Men’s attractiveness to women is completely summarized by Y i . 31 See Bergstrom and Bagnoli (1993) for a related model of decisions to delay marriage by men and the determinants of marriage age differences by sex. We consider models of single age cohorts of males and females and thereby abstract from the possible impact of the pill on sex differences in the age at marriage.
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