having children within rather than outside of marriage. We thus expect passage of MWPAs and MWEAs to reduce the likelihood … that single women become mothers of young children. We use probit regression to analyze individual data from the U … children. We also find that the “de-coverture” acts' effects were stronger for literate women, U.S.-born women, in states with …

children with lower initial family incomes vs. children with higher initial family incomes. However, offsetting this effect …, our findings also suggest that as children grow up, changes in family income ranking over time are related to children …