The Effect of Marital Breakup on the Income Distribution of Women with Children

Elizabeth O. Ananat and Guy Michaels

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman's first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women's average household income. Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of marital breakup throughout the income distribution, however, we find that divorce greatly increases the probability that a woman lives in a household with income in the bottom quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal earnings with child support, welfare, combining households, and substantially increasing their labor supply, divorce significantly increases the odds that a woman with children is poor.

Keywords: marital breakup; earnings of women; poverty; children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Marital Breakup on the Income Distribution of Women with Children (2008)
Working Paper: The Effect of Marital Breakup on the Income Distribution of Women with Children (2007)
Working Paper: The effect of marital breakup on the income distribution of women with children (2007)
Working Paper: The effect of marital breakup on the income distribution of women with children (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0787

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