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Breaking the marriage trap: unilateral divorce and its effects on labor supply of married women

Gema Pomares Varo
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: César Alonso-Borrego

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: We assess the impact of the 2005 divorce law reform in Spain, which reduced the time length and the costs of marriage termination, on the labor market outcomes of married women. We use independent cross sections of the Spanish Labor Force Survey between 2001 and 2009. As the reform affected married couples but not unmarried couples, we undertake a differences-in-differences approach to estimate the causal effect. Our results show that the reform substantially increased the participation and the occupation rates of married women by 4 and 3 percentage points, respectively, but reduced their average working hours by 5 percent. This latter result comes along with a large increase in part time employment due to the reform. The effects weremore pronounced for women without young children, with low education levels, and living in provinces where separate property was the default marital regime.

JEL-codes: C21 D19 J12 J16 J22 K36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-law and nep-lma
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:37157

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