For almost a century, anecdotes have suggested that divorce rates decline during recessions. However, until very recently there has been surprisingly little formal empirical evidence on whether such a link exists, let alone its magnitude if it does. Moreover, the anticipated direction of the effect is ambiguous theoretically. Although previous studies have concluded that individual job loss des...

This paper investigates how the adoption of unilateral divorce affects the gains from marriage and who marries whom. Exploiting variation in the timing of adoption across the US states, I first show that unilateral divorce increases assortative matching among newlyweds. To explain the link between divorce laws and matching patterns, I specify an equilibrium model of household formation, labor s...

Divorce is a common stressful event associated with both increased rates of depression and mortality. Given evidence of significant individual differences in depression following major life stressors, we examined if heterogeneous depression responses confer differential risk for mortality. Data from a population based longitudinal study was utilized to identify individuals who experienced divor...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether female earnings have influenced divorce rates in Australia, using state-level data for the past four decades. Following a recent study by Ressler and Waters (2000), which concludes from comparable US data that female earnings and divorce rates may be jointly endogenous, initial testing is performed to identify whether female earnings can be treate...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Children of Divorce Intervention Program (CODIP), a school-based, preventively oriented 10-week group program for fourth-grade through sixth-grade children of divorce. CODIP creates a supportive group atmosphere in which children can share divorce-related feelings, clarify common misconceptions, and reduce feelings of isolation and builds competence...

In this paper, we examine the role of the business cycle in divorce. To do so, we use a panel of 30 European countries covering the period from 1991 to 2010. We find a negative effect of the unemployment rate on the divorce rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of the divorce rate, even after controlling for socio-economic variables and unobservable characteristics that can vary by country...

Modern marriage markets display increasing turnover, with less marriage but more divorce and remarriage. As a consequence, a large number of children live in single parent and step parent households. There is substantial evidence that children of divorced parents do not perform as well as comparable children in intact families. However, there is also some evidence that this gap declines with th...

This study investigated the joint effects of spouses' socioeconomic positions on the risk of divorce in Finland. For couples in which both partners were at the lowest educational level, the risk of divorce was lower than could be expected on the basis of the previously documented overall inverse association between each spouse's education and the risk of divorce. Women who were employed or were...

This study examines the potential causal effect of parental divorce on child educational attainments, using annual data on individuals covering the entire time span between birth until the completion of ones schooling drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). A joint hazard model of schooling attainment and parental marital dissolution is estimated, allowing for correlations between...