POWRE: Simultaneity in the Timing of Young Women's Non-Martial Homeleaving, Non-Maritial Fertility, and Marriage

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This project is designed to provide research and educational enhancement for the investigator through training in and utilization of Dr. Lee Lillard's innovative simultaneous hazards model. The Lillard model allows multiple hazard processes to be jointly studied with two forms of potential dependencies among processes explicitly estimated: (1) correlations among unobserved heterogeneity components and (2) direct effects of the past history or actual hazard of one process on the hazard of another process. The Lillard model is also innovative in its flexible piecewise linear specification for `multiple clocks` that may affect the hazard rate (e.g., duration of marriage, individual's age, calendar time). A substantive application will jointly model three processes (non-marital homeleaving, non-marital fertility, and marriage) and address several research questions regarding the process of leaving the parental home outside of marriage and its relationship to the two other processes. The data include close to 4000 African American and white women who were born between 1938 and 1967 and participated in the National Survey of Families and Households. This project addresses critical gaps in research on the homeleaving process of young women in general and young mothers in particular, and has the potential to inform policymakers regarding welfare policies. The study will regorously consider developmental progressions which, although critical elements of life-span and life-course theories, have been relatively neglected by empiral research. In addition, the research adds to the literature on the leaving home process by moving from static to dynamic (event history) models and by accounting for endogeneity amoung routes out of the home. As such, the work can inform the research community regarding alternative explanations for shifting patterns in marital and non-marital routes out of the home in recent decases. Finally, the study will substantially extend the investigator's own and other past research on when young mothers live at home. By allowing for endogeneity in the timing and occurrence of childbearing, the model accounts for selective distinctions among childless women and earlier and later childbearers. Thus, fair comparisons can be made among these groups. In addition, by simultaneously considering exits from home within and outside of marriage, the study will be the first to pull together the small literature on AFDC effects on leaving the parental home and the larger literature on AFDC effects on marriage. The products of this educational and research enhancement will be substantial. The investigator's research involves the applied developmental and demographic sciences, and the joint analysis of endogenous event processes will be instrumental to her producing knowledge at the forefront of these fields over her career. She is committed to facilitating applications of the methodological advancements of a particular discipline to the methodological quandaries of another discipline or topical area. Through published applications of these methodologies, as well as instructional pieces, she hopes to facilitate the cross-utilization of such state-of-the-art methods.