Probability Of Divorce Research Articles

Does Paternity Leave Promote Gender Equality within Households?

We consider a non-cooperative model of the household, in which the husband and wife decide on parental leave and the allocation of time between child rearing and the labor market. They can choose the non-cooperative outside option or cooperate by reaching an agreement of specialization in which the wife specializes in raising kids (home production) while the husband works and transfers consumption to his wife. The model identifiesthree distinct groups of couples: Egalitarian couples (with a sufficiently low gender wage gap), Intermediate-gap couples (with an intermediate gender wage gap) and high-gap couples (with a sufficiently high gender wage gap). Our model predicts that while egalitarian couples never specialize and always share home production, those with intermediate and high gaps do have such an agreement. An expansion in paternity leave reduces the net benefits from the agreement and moves the intermediate-gap couples to their outside option where women work more and men do more home production. As a result, the cost of raising children increases and fertility declines. Assuming a loss of utility from children in the case of divorce, lower fertility increases the probability of divorce. Using Spanish data and RDD analysis, we confirm our model’s predictions. Specifically, while we don’t find systematic effects of paternity leave expansion on egalitarian and high-gap couples, we find that, among intermediate-gap couples, the two-week paternity leave introduced in 2007 resulted in a reduction in fertility by up to 60%, an increase in the probability to divorce by 37%, and an increase in father’s childcare and housework time as much as 2-3 hours per day.

Reconstruction of the Foundation of the Right to Request the Return of the Dowry

The “betrothal gift” system was born in the traditional culture of China for 5,000 years. After thousands of years of baptism, it still plays a huge role in China’s wedding custom. With the development of modern society and economy, the amount of our betrothal benefit turned out to be higher, the more complicated and diverse the types of gifts are.The level of civilization in modern society has greatly improved, people are more advocating freedom, and the probability of divorce between men and women is getting higher and higher, so there are also many issues related to bride price disputes. Although my country has issued the “Interpretation of the Marriage Law (2)”, which gives judges a legal basis for handling such cases, the judicial interpretation is too general and superficial, and cannot fully adapt to today’s complex and changeable trial work. I will discuss my opinions and opinions from some of the current rules for the return of the lottery.

Unlucky at work, unlucky in love: job loss and marital stability

This paper analyses the relationship between a husband’s job loss and marital stability, focusing on involuntary employment terminations due to plant closures or dismissals. Using discrete survival analysis techniques on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find plant closures and dismissals to be associated with a 54 and 74% higher risk of marital dissolution respectively, though the strength of association varies significantly by how long ago the change in employment status occurred. We extend the previous literature by considering heterogeneity in the relationship depending on whether new employment was found. Our analysis shows that the dissolution risk remains elevated even in couples where the husband has taken up a new position. Surprisingly, the relative risk of dissolution following the first period in a new job after a job loss is about the same as the relative risk of dissolution following the first period without employment. The relationship between finding a new job and marital dissolution appears to be mediated by changes in working hours as well as wages. In two extensions, we also consider the role of the wife’s employment status in moderating the relationship and show that a wife’s job loss is not associated with a similar increase in the probability of divorce as a husband’s.

All the Single Ladies: Job Promotions and the Durability of Marriage

We study how promotions to top jobs affect the probability of divorce. We compare the relationship trajectories of winning and losing candidates for mayor and parliamentarian and find that a promotion to one of these jobs doubles the baseline probability of divorce for women, but not for men. We also find a widening gender gap in divorce rates for men and women after being promoted to CEO. An analysis of possible mechanisms shows that divorces are concentrated in more gender-traditional couples, while women in more gender-equal couples are unaffected. (JEL J12, J16, M12, M51)

Stable Income, Stable Family

We document the effect of unemployment insurance generosity on divorce and fertility, using an identification strategy that leverages state-level changes in maximum benefits over time and comparisons across workers who have been laid off and those that have not been laid off. The results indicate that higher benefit levels reduce the probability of divorce and increase the probability of having children for laid-off men. In contrast, for laid-off women we find little evidence of effects of unemployment insurance generosity on divorce and we find suggestive evidence that it reduces their fertility. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

An economic analysis of women’s employment and divorce

Divorce is a condition that might bring economic and social problems. This study examined economic factors that affect probability of divorce on working women in West Sumatera based on Becker’s theory of divorce. Variables tested in this study are income, working hours, number of children, education, sector of work and employment status of ever married working women aged 15 and over, with marital status married and divorce based on National Economy and Sosial Survey 2016. Logistic regression analyses used to obtain likelihood estimate for probability of marital dissolution of employed women. The result of the study revealed that those factors include income, working hours, number of children, education, place of work and employment status, significantly affect the probability of divorce. Education has the maximum likelihood among other factors. The working women with low education have highest risk of divorce followed by those who work more than 40 hours per week, low income (poor), having no children or children less than 2, work in non agriculture and employment status as an employee.

Marital dissolution of transnational couples in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study examines the risk of transnational divorce in Korea using marriage and divorce registration data between 2010 and 2014 from Statistics Korea. We raise two research questions. First, how does risk of marital dissolution differ by type of marriage? Second, how do the socio-demographic factors of a transnational couple affect the probability of divorce? We find that transnational marriage has an extremely high risk of divorce within the first 48 months of marriage. About 19% of marriages between a Korean husband and a foreign wife were dissolved, while only 6% of marriages between Korean nationals ended within 48 months. Both Chinese husbands and wives have the highest risk of divorce, and foreign women from Southeast Asian countries also have a substantially high risk of divorce. Another important finding is that less educated foreign wives have a significantly higher probability of divorce than foreign wives with higher education. Lastly, acquisition of citizenship lowers the risk of divorce for foreign spouses. Given the increasing number of transnational couples in Korea, this study presents the actual risk of divorce according to marriage duration for the first time and provides the most complete description of transnational marital dissolution thus far.

Marriage and divorce after military deployment to Afghanistan: A matched cohort study from Sweden.

AimTo investigate the probability of marriage and divorce among Swedish military veterans deployed to Afghanistan relative to non-deployed matched comparators.Study design and settingMatched cohort study in Sweden.ParticipantsMilitary veterans were identified through Swedish military personnel registers regarding foreign deployments, and comparators from the Military Service Conscription Register (1969–2013). Of 1,882,411 eligible conscripts, 7041 had served in Afghanistan at some point in time between 2002 and 2013. To each military veteran, up to 5 non-deployed comparators who underwent conscription were matched by age, sex, psychological assessment, cognitive ability, psychiatric history and social characteristics. After matching there were 4896 (82%) unmarried and 1069 (18%) married deployed military veterans. The main outcome was marriage or divorce after deployment to Afghanistan. Data on marital status were retrieved from Statistics Sweden until December 31, 2014.ResultsDuring a median follow-up of 4.1 years after deployment of married individuals, 124 divorces were observed among deployed military veterans and 399 in the matched non-deployed comparator cohort (277 vs. 178 per 10,000 person-years; adjusted hazard ratio 1.61, 95%CI 1.31–1.97). During a median follow-up of 4.7 years after deployment in the unmarried cohort, 827 new marriages were observed among deployed military veterans and 4363 in the matched non-deployed comparators cohort (399 vs. 444 per 10,000 person-years; adjusted hazard ratio 0.89, 95%CI 0.83–0.96).ConclusionMilitary veterans were more likely to divorce and less likely to marry after deployment compared with matched non-deployed comparators.

When It Rains, It Pours: Under What Circumstances Does Job Loss Lead to Divorce

Much of the previous research that has examined the effect of job loss on the probability of divorce either rely on data from the 1970s–80s, data from European countries, or focus on aggregate divorce rates. This study uses U.S. micro‐data from 2000 to 2012 (thus including effects of the Great Recession) to examine how displacement (i.e., exogenous job loss) affects the probability of divorce. The author finds displacement significantly increases the probability of divorce but only if the husband is the spouse that is displaced, and his earnings represented approximately half or less of the household's earnings prior to displacement. Similarly, results show that the probability of divorce increases if the wife is employed and as her earnings increase. While the mechanism behind these asymmetric results remains unclear, these results are consistent with recent research that finds a destabilizing effect on marriages when a wife earns more than her husband.

Does Gold Price Matter for Divorce Rate in Iran?

The increasing divorce rate has become a major social concern for policy makers in the Islamic government of Iran. The price of gold coin is an important factor in cost-benefit analysis for individuals in their marriage and divorce decisions in Iran. Dowries (Mehrieh) are usually in the form of gold coin and a wife has a legal right to request them from her husband upon both parties signing the marriage contract. Increasing the price of gold coin may intensify the internal stress and struggles within families, leading to a higher probability of divorce. We investigated the long-run relationship between real price of gold coin and divorce rate for the case of Iran over the period 1980–2014. Controlling for other factors such as women’s education, social globalization, economic growth rate, and the war period with Iraq, our regression results showed that there is a positive and significant long-run relationship between real price of gold coin (as well as unanticipated changes in real price of gold coin) and marital instability.

Reprint of: Marriage and health: Selection, protection, and assortative mating

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we analyze the health gap between married and unmarried individuals of working-age. Controlling for observables, we find a gap that peaks at 10% points at ages 55–59 years. The marriage health gap is similar for men and women. If we allow for unobserved heterogeneity in innate health (permanent and age-dependent), potentially correlated with timing and likelihood of marriage, we find that the effect of marriage on health disappears below age 40 years, while about 5% points difference between married and unmarried individuals remains at older ages (55–59 years). This indicates that the observed gap is mainly driven by selection into marriage at younger ages, but there might be a protective effect of marriage at older ages. Exploring the mechanisms behind this result, we find that better innate health is associated with a higher probability of marriage and a lower probability of divorce, and there is strong assortative mating among couples by innate health. We also find that married individuals are more likely to have a healthier behavior compared to unmarried ones. Finally, we find that health insurance is critical for the beneficial effect of marriage.

Marriage and health: Selection, protection, and assortative mating

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we analyze the health gap between married and unmarried individuals of working-age. Controlling for observables, we find a gap that peaks at 10% points at ages 55–59 years. The marriage health gap is similar for men and women. If we allow for unobserved heterogeneity in innate health (permanent and age-dependent), potentially correlated with timing and likelihood of marriage, we find that the effect of marriage on health disappears below age 40 years, while about 5% points difference between married and unmarried individuals remains at older ages (55–59 years). This indicates that the observed gap is mainly driven by selection into marriage at younger ages, but there might be a protective effect of marriage at older ages. Exploring the mechanisms behind this result, we find that better innate health is associated with a higher probability of marriage and a lower probability of divorce, and there is strong assortative mating among couples by innate health. We also find that married individuals are more likely to have a healthier behavior compared to unmarried ones. Finally, we find that health insurance is critical for the beneficial effect of marriage.

The Impact of a Permanent Income Shock on the Situation of Women in the Household: The Case of a Pension Reform in Argentina

Income transfers from social programs are often not gender neutral, according to the vast literature on intrahousehold decision-making and allocation, and should affect the distribution of bargaining power within the household. This result, however, was by and large established under the assumption of marriage stability. If this assumption does not hold (because of divorce or separation), then the positive response of bargaining power to income found in the empirical research may be the artifact of sample selection. In this paper, we prove that the marriage stability assumption is wrong, even when applied to seniors. We use a noncontributory pension reform in Argentina, which resulted in an unexpected and substantial increase in permanent income for at least 1.8 million women, to study its effects on outcomes related to both marital stability and women’s bargaining power within the household. We find that the reform increased the probability of divorce or separation among highly educated senior women but had no impact on those with less education. Instead, the latter gained considerable bargaining power within the household by decreasing the probability of being the only one in charge of household chores along with an increase in their husbands’ participation in these chores.

Job Displacement, Family Dynamics and Spousal Labor Supply

We study interdependencies in spousal labor supply and the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance in a sample of married couples, where the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure using data from the Austrian Social Security Database. We show that in our sample of relatively young couples the shock hits households at crucial stages of family formation, which requires careful modeling of the wives' counterfactual lifecycle labor market patterns. In our empirical analysis, we propose three independent control groups of unaffected households to identify the causal effects of husbands' displacement on wives' labor supply. Our empirical results show that husbands suffer large and persistent employment and earnings losses over the first 5 years after displacement. But wives' labor supply increases only moderately and they respond predominantly at the extensive margin. The implied participation elasticity with respect to the husband's earnings shock is very small, about -0:04. While the wives' earnings gains recover only a tiny fraction of the household income loss, public transfers and taxes are a more important insurance at least in the short run. In terms of non-labor market related outcomes, we find a small positive effect on the probability of divorce, but no effect of the husband's job displacement on fertility. The presence and ages of children in the household are crucial determinants of the wife's labor supply response. The most responsive group are mothers, who are planning to return to the labor market after a maternity break, while mothers of very young children or wives without children remain unresponsive. We thus conclude that Austria's strong gender identity norms are an explanation for the limited scope of intra-household insurance.

Correlation of Disgust and Contempt Expressions with Conjugal Dissatisfaction

Research has shown that dissatisfied couples in the relationship commonly exhibit facial expressions of contempt in interactions. At this point, based on the study of cognition and physiology, researchers were able to predict by longitudinal studies the probability of divorce in a marriage, with accuracy of up to 94%. Our objective was to investigate whether the occurrence of facial expressions of disgust and contempt in married women is associated with marital dissatisfaction. This is an experimental study that correlated, through filmed interviews, the frequency of facial expressions of disgust and disgust (Facial Action Coding System) to the Marital State’s Golombok Rust Inventory, in a sample composed of 20 women. Data analysis based on the Spearman Correlation Test showed a positive correlation between facial expressions of disgust and disdain and conjugal dissatisfaction (rs = 0.2198, p = 0.0280), corroborating the data in the literature.

Difference in arrival date at the breeding site between former pair members predicts divorce in blue tits

Divorce occurs when both members of a breeding pair survive to the following year but then pair with other individuals instead of reuniting. Divorce is common in birds, but its frequency can vary widely both between and within species, or even between populations across years. Several explanations for divorce have been described, both adaptive and nonadaptive. Many studies have compared the breeding success of faithful and divorced individuals, but fewer have considered the process of divorce, i.e. the events that lead up to divorce. In this study, we used data from eight breeding seasons to investigate divorce in a population of blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, in southern Germany. To compare our results to previous work, we first describe the frequency of divorce and compare the breeding success of divorced and faithful pairs. We then use data from an RFID transponder-based system, where all visits of individuals to any nestbox in the study site are automatically recorded throughout the year, to compare the behaviour of pairs in the interbreeding period. We found that the probability of divorce was not affected by breeding success in Year X. However, divorce was predicted by the difference in arrival time to the study site between the members of Year X pairs. Furthermore, during the interbreeding period, compared to their divorced counterparts, members of faithful pairs had more interactions with one another than with other individuals of the opposite sex. In Year X + 1, faithful females started egg laying earlier, had somewhat larger clutches and produced slightly more fledglings, than females that had divorced. We propose that divorce in blue tits is a by-product of separation of the two pair members after the Year X breeding season, leading to asynchrony in the timing of settlement and pair formation in Year X + 1.

Marriage and the economic status of women with children

Marriage is positively correlated with income, and women with children are much less likely to be in poverty if they are married. Selection into marriage makes it difficult to assess whether these correlations represent a causal effect of marriage. One instrument for marriage proposed in past research is the gender of a woman’s first child. We find that women who have a boy first are about 0.33 percentage points more likely to be married at any point in time. This effect operates through both increasing the probability that unmarried mothers marry the child’s father and reducing the probability of divorce. We also find that women whose first child is a boy experience higher levels of family income and are less likely to receive welfare income, be below the poverty line, and receive food stamps. Estimates using child gender as an instrumental variable for marriage suggest that marriage plays a large causal role in improving the economic well-being of women with children and that these effects are largest among women at the lower end of the income distribution.

Regional Diffusion of Divorce in Turkey

While demographic change has been well documented for many Western countries, much less is known about demographic transitions in other countries, including Turkey. Demographic change in European societies can be characterized by, amongst others, increased prevalence of divorce. Although it is often argued that life courses in Turkey follow a more traditional path, little is known on determinants and patterns of divorce, despite the major socioeconomic changes Turkey has undergone over the past decades. We study the levels of divorce of women in Turkey from 1973 to 2008 to explain patterns of divorce, looking at the role of individual characteristics and the regional context. We use the Demographic Health Surveys (2003/2008), complemented with regional data on divorce, urbanization, and GDP per capita. Applying a multilevel approach, distinguishing 12 regions, we hypothesize that regions where divorce is already more prevalent, more urbanized regions, and wealthier regions in terms of GDP per capita will increase the probability of divorce. Our analyses show that levels of divorce increased over the past decades but huge regional variation remains. Sociocultural and socioeconomic factors explain this trend, and in particular urbanization and GDP per capita are key determinants for divorce.

Benefit System and Marriage Dissolution Among Working Families

In this paper I use a tax and benefit micro-simulator of the U.K. welfare system to study the demographic challenges this country faces in relation to household formation. Specifically, I estimate to what extent the marriage penalties created by the welfare state can affect the divorce rate. The welfare system in the U.K subsidises the lone parenthood and the marriage penalties created by the system are found to be higher among low earning households. With the help of the tax and benefit simulator, I impute the counterfactual effect of divorce on the net benefit entitlements of a sub sample of working families. The traditional economic model of marriage implies that increasing public support for unmarried mothers generally increases the prevalence of single-headed households. My findings suggest that £100 weekly increase in marriage penalties increases the probability of divorce by around 7%.

WORK LIMITING HEALTH AND DIVORCE BEHAVIOR: A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS WITH SIPP DATA

In this paper, we consider the role of all work limiting health conditions on divorce behavior but we distinguish between less (exogenous) predictable versus more (endogenous) predictable shocks. We divide the reported health conditions in the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) into those that appear to arrive randomly conditional on age for married men and women versus those that appear to be more predictable. The six work limiting health conditions that appear to arrive largely exogenously are cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, deafness or serious trouble hearing, paralysis, thyroid trouble and tumor cyst or growth. How the onset of work limiting conditions then affects divorce is studied across different demographic groups. The primary result of the study is that the onset of health problems that are unpredictable generally does not increase the likelihood of divorce while the divorce behavior is closely related to the onset or evolution of a broader, arguably endogenous set of health conditions. However, the patterns of response are shown to vary by race and ethnicity. For example, the onset of health conditions that do appear to be statistically related to demographic factors known to correlate with poor health behaviors appear to be associated with a statistically significant increase in the probability of divorce particularly among minority (Black and Hispanic) groups. The data used in the study are drawn from the SIPP, particularly from the topical module on “work disability history”, and the retrospective histories are used to construct a panel over the individuals’ lives. The primary estimation method is a panel linear probability model with fixed-effects.