An Empirical Analysis of the Influence of Divorce Cooling-off Period on Divorce Rate in Chinese Context

Abstract

In 2020, the number of divorcees in China was as high as 3.733 million. The high divorce rate has become an unavoidable problem in today's society. Therefore, China officially implemented a cooling-off period policy for divorce in 2021, aiming to reduce the occurrence of impulsive divorces and lower the divorce rate by Increase the consideration time of the parties. Since its implementation, the policy has sparked heated discussions about its ethical and practical effects in China. This study focuses on the practical effects of divorce cooling-off period, and uses Ordinary Least Square (OLS) mixed multiple linear regression and other empirical tools to test the impact of divorce cooling-off period on divorce rate. The results show that the implementation of divorce cooling-off period has a significant effect on the decrease of divorce rate, however, the decrease regression coefficient is not large. It can be shown that in the context of China, the divorce cooling-off period plays a certain role and can be further implemented, but at the same time, more attention should be paid to its improvement. Subjective initiative should be exerted and external mediation mechanism should be added in the cooling-off period in order to achieve better results.