The Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: Evidence from China

Abstract

The paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of divorce in China with the data from The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The empirical results show that parental divorce increases the odd ratio of children’s divorce significantly by 104.12% in complementary log-log model at 5% level with control variables, which means the probability of their children’s divorce will increase significantly. We adopt two models to investigate the heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of divorce. Firstly, according to the age when children experiencing parental divorce, the sample is divided into four groups:0-3 years old, 4-11 years old, 12-17 years old and over 17 years old. Secondly, based on whether parents remarry or not, the sample is also divided into four groups: none, just father, just mother and both remarry. The estimation results show that, the effect of parental divorce is more significant for those who experienced the parental divorce between the age of 4 and 11, the odds ratio would add by 174.39% significantly in complementary log-log model at 5% level with control variables. If just father remarried after parental divorced, odds ratio of divorce would increase by 361.09% in complementary log-log model at 1% level with control variables.