Does divorce risk depend on spouses´ relative income? A register-based study of first marriages in Sweden in 1981–1998

Guiping Liu and Andres Vikat
Additional contact information
Guiping Liu: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Andres Vikat: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

No WP-2004-010, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: The relationship between increasing women’s earnings and rising divorce rates frequently has been explained by the so-called independence effect: If a wife enjoys a higher earning than her husband does, she gains less from marriage. It has also been argued that in a society with egalitarian gender attitudes this effect is less important. In this paper, we test if the independence effect applies to Sweden, a country in which egalitarian gender views dominate and female labor-force participation and divorce rates are high. Our analysis is based on a large register data set and intensity regression models. We found support for the ‘independence effect’: The linear relationship between the share of a wife’s income and the divorce risk is positive. We also found that the higher the total income of the couple, the lower their divorce risk, but this relationship appears to be less strong.

Keywords: Sweden; divorce; family dynamics; income; marriage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2004-010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2004-010

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2004-010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Wilhelm ().