Does Mobile Phone Penetration Affect Divorce Rate? Evidence from China

Jiaping Zhang, Mingwang Cheng, Xinyu Wei and Xiaomei Gong
Additional contact information
Jiaping Zhang: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Mingwang Cheng: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Xinyu Wei: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Xiaomei Gong: College of Economics and Trade, Hunan University of Commerce, Changsha 410205, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Marital happiness is an important symbol of social harmony and can help promote sustainable economic and social development. In recent years, the rapid rise of the divorce rate in China, a country where the divorce rate had previously been low, has attracted wide attention. However, few articles have focused on the popularization of information and communication technology's impact on China’s rising divorce rate in recent years. As a first attempt, the provincial panel data during the period 2001–2016 is applied to study quantitatively the relationship between mobile phone penetration and the divorce rate. In order to get more reliable estimation results, this paper uses two indicators to measure the divorce rate, and quantile regression is applied for further analysis. Additionally, one-year to five-year lag times of the mobile phone penetration are used as the core explanatory variables in order to analyse the lagging effect of mobile phone penetration on divorce rate. The result shows that the correlation between the mobile phone penetration and the divorce rate was statistically positive significant in China during the period 2001–2016. Furthermore, the paper also finds that mobile phone penetration had the greatest impact on divorce rate in central China, followed by eastern China, but it was not obvious in western China during this period. From a technological perspective, this paper provides some possible explanations for the rising divorce rate in China in recent years, and further enriches the relevant research on the impact of the development of information and communication technology on societal changes.

Keywords: mobile phone penetration; divorce rate; marital happiness; well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/10/3701/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/10/3701/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:10:p:3701-:d:175831

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().