Economic Determinants of Divorce Among Dual-Earner Couples: Jews in Israel

Les déterminants économiques du divorce parmi les couples à double revenu: le cas des juifs en Israël

Liat Raz-Yurovich ()
Additional contact information
Liat Raz-Yurovich: Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research

European Journal of Population, 2012, vol. 28, issue 2, No 4, 177-203

Abstract: Abstract The second half of the twentieth century saw tremendous changes in the economics of the household, as women entered the labor force in growing numbers and the share of dual-earners couples increased. These changes challenge the available theories which explain divorce by economic factors, as they are mostly molded in the homemaker-breadwinner model. In this study, we investigate the validity of two main groups of theories: one which asserts that women’s work has a destabilizing effect on marriage, and assumes asymmetry between the spouses; and another which states that women’s employment has a stabilizing effect, and assumes that relations between spouses are symmetric. By employing a large-scale longitudinal register-based data for the Jewish population in Israel, we find asymmetry in the effect of the spouses’ economic characteristics on marital instability, which suggest that theories that assert asymmetry and power relations between the spouses better explain transition to divorce among this group. In line with theories of income pooling, higher shared salaries are found to increase marital stability. Nonetheless, our results demonstrate that the basic assumption of symmetry between the spouses in these theories does not hold. Although employment stability for both spouses appears to reduce divorce risk, only the husband’s salary is shown to negatively affect the odds of divorce and only the wife’s working hours and sector of employment affect marriage instability. Moreover, couples in which the wife earns as much as or more than the husband are found to have the highest divorce risk.

Keywords: Divorce; Dual-earner; Dual-career; Employment stability; Israeli families; Marital dissolution; Paid work; Register-data; Divorce; Double revenu; Double carrière; Stabilité de l’emploi; Familles israéliennes; Dissolution du mariage; Travail rémunéré; Données de registre (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-012-9256-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eurpop:v:28:y:2012:i:2:d:10.1007_s10680-012-9256-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-012-9256-3

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

More articles in European Journal of Population from Springer, European Association for Population Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().