“We see a decline in fertility, a decline in marriage, but a rise in the fraction of births that are disadvantaged, and as a consequence the kids are living in pretty tough circumstances,” Autor, the study’s lead author, told me.

Fertility has declined and out-of-wedlock births have risen all over America during the past three decades, not just in areas where jobs have been displaced by trade. But the authors show that these trends have been much more pronounced in areas that have lost a significant number of manufacturing jobs, where, as a result, men’s prospects have declined disproportionately. This worsening of the fates of men has been long predicted, including in The Atlantic in the summer of 2010, when Hanna Rosin highlighted how women’s bettering prospects would lead to “The End of Men.”

In this study, the authors looked at what happens when a “trade shock” impacted certain areas around the country. They looked at instances when imports from China started to compete with the product a local industry made, causing job losses and plant closures. (In a previous paper, the authors had found that rising competition from Chinese imports depressed wages and eliminated American jobs.)

They found that manufacturing declines significantly affected the supply of what they termed “marriageable” men—men who are not drinking or using drugs excessively and who have a job. In areas impacted by a trade shock, the numbers of marriageable men relative to women declined, because men had migrated elsewhere, joined the military, or fallen out of the labor force. Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing. (Fewer women worked in manufacturing in the first place, so they were less affected by the shocks.)

This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman.

Yet women didn’t give up on having babies entirely. Plenty of young women are still getting pregnant, but they’re no longer as likely to have married their partner when they do, the authors found. (The share of children born to unmarried mothers more than doubled between 1980 and 2013, from 18 to 41 percent.) When young women become pregnant unintentionally, they have to decide whether to have the baby and whether to marry the father or not, said Autor. That evaluation becomes more fraught when the man doesn’t have a good job. Marriage to such men can be risky: They may not contribute very much income, but they could factor into family decisions. “You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch,” Autor said.