**4) Partner’s parental family (“in-laws”) characteristics (Table 5):** There do not seem to be robust effects of own schooling attainment on _inlaws’ land holdings_ , though the IV estimates suggest that more-schooled males may marry into families with less land (but only in the fourth specification is the coefficient estimate significantly nonzero).

In contrast, the OLS estimates indicate significant positive associations between own schooling and _parent-inlaw schooling attainments_ , that become bigger for the IV estimates that control for the behavioral determination of own schooling attainment and that generally tend to be, if anything, bigger for females than for males. The IV estimates for female’s father-in-law’s schooling attainment, in fact, are so large – suggesting that for every additional grade of own schooling female’s father’s-in-law have 0.7 to 0.8 grades of schooling – as to raise questions of plausibility. Nevertheless, the estimates for parent-inlaw schooling attainment as a group suggest that individuals with more schooling attainment marry into families with greater schooling attainment, possibly more so than the OLS associations alone suggest.

# **6. Conclusions**

The age of first union and the age of first parenting are of considerable concern both in the academic and in the policy areas, not only because of their implications for individual welfare and well-being over the life cycle, but also because they are strongly associated with fertility patterns that are thought to have important implications for the broader society as well as for the adolescents and young adults involved. But the many positive _associations_ between schooling attainment and ages of first union and first parenting in the previous literature do _not_ mean that increasing education _causes_ increases in ages of first union and first parenting. There are at least three major problems in making such an inference from previous studies, as discussed in the introduction. In this study we contribute to the literature by investigating the impact of schooling attainment on ages of first union and first parenting using unusually rich data collected over 35 years in Guatemala. We advance beyond the previous literature with regard to all three of these limitations in the literature: (1) We treat schooling as behaviorally-determined, (2) we include other aspects of individuals’ human capital and parental family background; and (3) we include outcomes, additional to ages of first union and first parenting, such as union partner’s human capital and union partner’s family’ social and economic status. We summarize our results with respect to each of these three points.

_First_ , treating schooling attainment as behaviourally-determined within a dynamic life cycle affects substantially some of the estimates of the impact of increasing schooling on the outcomes being considered. For females: the negative impacts are much greater than in the usual estimates that do not control for the behavioral determinants of schooling on the probability of ever having been in an union, whether their first union or their first parenting was when they were younger than 18 y and on their partner’s BMI -- and the positive impacts on age of first union, age of first parenting and partner’s and partner’s parents’ schooling attainment, likewise, are if anything greater. Such patterns suggest that, for example, there are unobserved factors (e.g. preferences for independence) that directly reduce the probability of being in a union and that are positively correlated with schooling attainment, so that when these factors are ignored in the estimates of the impact of schooling on being in a union ever or when young or having a first child when young, the estimated impact of schooling attainment is greater algebraically (i.e., less negative) than if there is control for these factors. For males: the apparently significantly negative associations of own schooling 13