Where Did it Go Wrong ?Marriage and Divorce in Malawi

Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, Selma Walther and Frederic Vermeulen

Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Do individuals divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure theattractiveness of new matches in the marriage market? We answer thesequestions using a structural model of the household and a rich panel datasetfrom Malawi. We propose a model of the household with consumption,production and revealed preference conditions for stability on the marriagemarket. We define marital instability in terms of the consumption gains toremarrying another individual in the same marriage market, and to beingsingle. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the wife's estimatedconsumption gains from remarriage is significantly associated with a 0.6percentage point increase in divorce probability in the next three years. Ina multinomial model, higher values of consumption gains from remarriageraise the odds of divorce and remarriage but not of divorce and singleness.These findings provide out-of-sample validation of the structural model andshed new light on the economic determinants of divorce.

Keywords: marriage market; divorce; Malawi; agricultural production; revealed preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 D13 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 p.
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/2283 ... EULEN-wheredidit.pdf Full text for the whole work, or for a work part (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Where did it go wrong? Marriage and divorce in Malawi (2021)
Working Paper: Where did it go wrong? Marriage and divorce in Malawi (2016)
Working Paper: Where Did It Go Wrong? Marriage and Divorce in Malawi (2016)
Working Paper: Where Did It Go Wrong? Marriage and Divorce In Malawi (2016)
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:eca:wpaper:2013/228335

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/228335

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().