Would higher male earnings drive a marriage boom?

The results of that research cast doubt on the notion that an improvement in men’s economic position will necessarily increase marriage rates.  The fracking boom of the first decade of the 2000s, which gave rise to economic booms in US towns and cities where they wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, provided a rare opportunity to investigate whether an improvement in the economic prospects of men without a four-year college degree would lead to a reduction in the nonmarital birth share.  In a 2018 study that I wrote with my coauthor Riley Wilson, we used a fracking boom to test a “reverse marriageable men” hypothesis…

Our first finding was that these local fracking booms led to overall increases in total births, an increase of roughly 3 births per 1,000 women…

To our surprise, the increase in births associated with fracking booms occurred as much with unmarried partners as with married ones.  The “reverse marriageable men” hypothesis, which predicted that improvements in the economic circumstances of men would lead to an increase in marriage and a reduction in the share of births outside marriage, was not what the data showed.

That is from Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.  Here is the original research.  Note also that pp.96-100 of this book provide strong evidence against the claim that the welfare state has been driving the rise in single-parent families.