Divorce Laws and the Structure of the American Family

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of no-fault divorce laws on marriage and divorce in the United States. I propose a theory that captures the key stylized facts of the rising then declining divorce rates and the apparent convergence of divorce rates across the different divorce regimes. The empirical results suggest that a shift from fault to no-fault divorce increased the odds of divorcing for those couples who married before the shift. The analysis further suggests that those couples who marry after the shift to a no-fault regime, in turn, sort themselves better upon marriage, which offsets the direct effect of the law on divorce rates. Consistent with that selectivity argument, after a switch to a no-fault divorce regime, women get married later in life. These results hold for the law that governs property division and spousal support. The law that governs divorce grounds does not seem to matter significantly.

Keywords: divorce; marriage; law; no-fault; fault; property; grounds; surprise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
Date: Written 2006-07-10
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/498832 Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Divorce Laws and the Structure of the American Family (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics
Address: 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario
Series data maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().