Thread by @NickWolfinger

Thread: my year of research. Like last year, I wrote a bunch of research notes for @FamStudies, but did some real scholarship too.

/1

First, being a parent has little effect on adults’ happiness in midlife, but parents are appreciably happier with empty nests.

ifstudies.org/blog/does-havi…

/2

For men, the benefits of parenthood for happiness have grown significantly over time.

/3

People who get married having had only one (or zero) sex partners are somewhat happier in their marriages, a finding that can’t be explained with measured variables.

ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexu…

/4

The effect of premarital sex partners on marital happiness is larger than the effect of the usual demographic suspects like education.

/5

Most Americans have only had a few sex partners, but a few have had a lot.

ifstudies.org/blog/promiscuo…

/6

Promiscuity, defined as being in the top 5% of the distribution of lifetime sex partners, has become more common for women & less common for men.

/7

Promiscuous Americans are smarter & better educated than their less sexed up peers.

/8

Promiscuous Americans are a bit less happy.

/9

American sexual behavior changed permanently with the cohorts born in the 1940s and 1950s. Since then the median number of lifetime partners has held steady for everyone except college-educated men.

ifstudies.org/blog/nine-deca…

/10

Writing for @martincenter, I aver that frivolous Title IX cases like my own are an insult to the victims of sexual misconduct.

jamesgmartin.center/2018/01/title-…

/11

With Chris Ellison, I presented a paper at Southern Sociological Society with a weird finding. Using Fragile Families data, we show that people who attend church frequently are less likely to report being victims of domestic violence.

/12

Actual progress occurred on my long-delayed book on the economics of single motherhood, coauthored w/ Matt McKeever. An overview appears in this older article:

psmag.com/economics/chan…

/13

We’re now working on data analysis that account for all of the unobservable differences between married, divorced, and never-married mothers.

Fixed effects models eliminate the difference between divorced & never-married mothers.

/14

We extended the Hotz et al. 2005 natural experiment to all non-marital fertility by contrasting women who give birth out of wedlock with women who miscarry.

Most of these women would be poor even if they hadn’t had kids.

/15

That small divergence at the end of the time series is based on a small number of miscarriages & probably isn't remarkable.

/16

(& some context I should have included earlier: lifetime earnings for the NLSY79 cohort by family structure of origin.)

/17

(& here's the Hotz et al. paper for anyone interested in the model.)

nber.org/papers/w7397

/18

Next up: finish the book before @OUP, our publisher, gives up on us.

/end