Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results

Justin Wolfers

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across US states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization. I show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime. Taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock, I find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade, but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade. That said, this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century. Both administrative data on the flow of new divorces, and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion. These results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage, with an eye to their partner's divorce threat.

Date: 2003-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1819.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to gsbapps.stanford.edu:443 (Bad file descriptor) (http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1819.pdf [302 Found]--> https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1819.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results (2006)
Working Paper: Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results (2003)
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:ecl:stabus:1819

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().