Do children stabilize relationships in Denmark

In this paper, we study the relationship between fertility behaviour and the process of relationship duration. The potential endogeneity of fertility on disso-lution risk is taken into account by modeling fertility and dissolution jointly. We apply the timing-of-event method (Abbring & van den Berg (2003)) to identify the causal effect of births on the dissolution hazard. We show that couples who are less prone to split up are more prone to invest in children, and therefore one might (mistakenly) conclude that children stabilize relationships. However, when correcting for the selectivity bias arising from the fertility decision, we conclude that children themselves have a negative effect on relationship duration