But Who Will Get Billy? The Effect of Child Custody Laws on Marriage

Elaina Rose and Ho-Po Crystal Wong
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Elaina Rose: University of Washington
Ho-Po Crystal Wong: West Virginia University, College of Business and Economics

No 14-30, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Under the tender years doctrine in effect until the 1970’s, custody was virtually always awarded to the mother upon divorce. Gender-neutral custody laws introduced beginning in the 1970’s provided married fathers, in principle, equal rights to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended the rights to unmarried fathers. We develop a theoretical model of the effect of custody regime on marriage and test the model’s predictions using a unique data set that merges custody law data with data from the Current Population Survey and Vital Statistics. We find that, under marriage non-neutrality, the introduction of gender-neutral laws reduced the hazard into marriage by at least 7.9 percent. There is no evidence that moving from marriage non-neutrality to marriage neutrality affected marriage under the gender-neutral custody regime.

Keywords: Marriage; Custody; Family Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 J12 J16 J18 K36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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