Given that divorce often represents a high-stakes income gamble, we ask how individual levels of risk tolerance affect the decision to divorce. We extend the orthodox divorce model by assuming that individuals are risk averse, that marriage is risky, and that divorce is even riskier. The model predicts that conditional on the expected gains to marriage and divorce, the probability of divorce in...

BACKGROUND Several studies have reported an increase in risk behaviors among adolescents after experience of parental divorce. The aim of the study was to investigate whether parental divorce is associated with risk behavior among adolescents independent of mental health problems, first when early divorce was experienced, and second after experience of late parental divorce. METHOD One prospe...

Although divorces place millions of women from poor countries into hardship, we know little about this issue and its causes. This paper shows that the lack of children is a leading cause for divorce. We use twins and gender of firstborns as instruments to estimate the effect of the number of children and the existence of a son on mother’ marital statuses. The 2009 Vietnam Population Census show...

This article explores the remarkable shift in marriage and divorce practices that has occurred in the last third of this century in the United States. Initially, information is presented on trends in divorce and remarriage; commonalities and differences between family patterns in the United States and in other industrialized nations are discussed. The author then identifies some of the factors ...

BACKGROUND Former studies have shown increased mental health problems in adolescents after parental divorce all over the Western world. We wanted to see if that still is the case in Norway today when divorce turns to be more and more common. METHODS In a prospective study design, two samples were constituted, adolescents at a baseline survey in 2001/02 (n = 2422) and those at follow-up in 200...

This article explores to what extent married middle-aged individuals in Europe are governed by the risk of experiencing divorce, when shaping their physical appearance. The main result is that divorce risks, proxied by national divorce rates, are negatively connected to body mass index (BMI) among married individuals but unrelated to BMI among singles. Hence, it seems that married people in soc...

Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across US states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization. I show that these results reflect a ...

BACKGROUND In this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children’s educational attainment by parental education. OBJECTIVE The study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary education attainment varies by socioeconomic background...

The effects of parental divorce on the levels of aggression, hostility, and anxiety in children, as measured by the Rorschach test, together with the type and direction of aggression, as measured by the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration (P-F) Study, were studied. The Rorschach and the Rosenzweig P-F study were administered to a nonclinical sample of 108 Swedish children ranging in age from 10 to 1...

Contrary to previous studies treating divorce as a couple’s decision, we make a distinction between ‘his’, ‘her’, and ‘their’ divorce by using information about who initiated divorce. Using competing risk analysis, we re-examine four well-known determinants of divorce: (i) the wife’s employment, (ii) the financial situation of the household, (iii) the presence of children, and (iv) the quality ...