Marital Biography and Mothers’ Wealth

Adrianne Frech (), Matthew Painter () and Jonathan Vespa ()
Additional contact information
Adrianne Frech: The University of Akron
Matthew Painter: The University of Wyoming
Jonathan Vespa: Fertility and Family Statistics Branch

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2017, vol. 38, issue 2, No 8, 279-292

Abstract: Abstract We used over 20 years of data to estimate differences in mothers’ wealth across marital biography, following a marital first birth. Our study is the first to account for the selection of mothers into divorce or remarriage when estimating the role that marital history plays in wealth accumulation. Mothers who remained stably married to the biological father of their firstborn child reported greater wealth in their forties than mothers who divorced and did not remarry. Those who married at younger ages, women of color, and women from lower-income families were less likely to remain stably married. Net of selection, mothers who remained remarried had the same wealth as continuously married mothers. Thus the characteristics that predispose mothers to divorce, and not divorce per se, are linked to lower wealth. Once these selection effects were accounted for, we concluded that divorce was not necessarily detrimental to mothers’ economic security, a new finding that contradicts past studies.

Keywords: Divorce; Marriage; Remarriage; Wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10834-016-9508-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jfamec:v:38:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10834-016-9508-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/10834/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10834-016-9508-1

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Family and Economic Issues is currently edited by Joyce Serido

More articles in Journal of Family and Economic Issues from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().