Does Culture Affect Divorce Decisions? Evidence from European Immigrants in the US

Delia Furtado, Miriam Marcén and Almudena Sevilla ()

No 5960, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper explores the role of culture in determining divorce decisions by examining country of origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of US laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home country variables including average church attendance and GDP. Moreover, specifications with country of origin fixed effects suggest that divorce probabilities are especially low for immigrants from countries with low divorce rates that reside amidst a large number of co-ethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.

Keywords: immigrants; culture; divorce (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J61 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - published in: Demography, 2013, 50 (3), 1013-1038

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5960.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Culture Affect Divorce Decisions? Evidence from European Immigrants in the US (2010)
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:iza:izadps:dp5960

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().