Black Men’s Imprisonment and Black Women’s Non-Martial Fertility Rate: A County-Level Analysis

Yujin Kim, University of Texas at Austin

Unequal expansion of incarceration among black men with less education has influenced black men’s lives including family formation behaviors, education, and employment. However, prior studies have paid little attention to the potential effect of black men’s incarceration on black women’s family formation behaviors, especially non-marital births at the aggregate level. Thus, this study investigated the following research questions: 1) how much does the non-marital fertility rate among blacks vary by county? and 2) what is the association between black men’s incarceration and black women’s non-marital fertility rate within counties? To investigate these research questions,fixed effect models were estimated. Findings show that black women’s non-marital fertility rates vary by county in all three years, and that the level of changes in black men’s conditional release rate is positively associated with changes in black women’s non-marital fertility rate within a county even after adjusting for an extensive set of controls.