Age at Marriage, Divorce, Fertility and Labor Force Participation of Women: a Time Series Perspective

Abstract

This paper uses vector-autoregressions to gain insights into the dynamic relationships between age at marriage, divorce, fertility, and labor force participation of women. The use of vector-autoregressions let us circumvent the statistical problems faced by previous studies. Age at marriage, fertility, the divorce rate, and the labor force participation rate are permitted to depend on the past values of each other. The impulse response simulations allowed us to observe the short-run reactions of the variables to the unexpected perturbations in the system. Contrary to the evidence presented by cross-sectional analyses, no significant influence of young marriages on the divorce rate is found: A positive shock to the proportion of young marriages did not generate an increase in the divorce rate. On the other hand, young marriages and the divorce rate simultaneously increased or decreased when there were increases in the fertility or the labor force participation rates. This outcome implied that the inverse association between age at marriage and divorce is not a causal relationship; rather divorces and marriages co-vary due to changes in labor force participation and fertility. The results hold when we use the unemployment rate for women as the labor market variable.