The effect of marital breakup on the income distribution of women with children

Elizabeth Ananat and Guy Michaels

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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 divorce on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women’s mean household income. However, using a Quantile Treatment Effect methodology (Abadie et al. 2002) we find that divorce widens the income distribution: it increases the probability that a woman has very low or very high household income. It appears that some women successfully generate income through child support, welfare, combining households, and increased labor supply after divorce, while others are markedly unsuccessful. Thus, although divorce has little effect on mean income, it nonetheless increases poverty and inequality. These findings imply that divorce has important welfare consequences.

Keywords: divorce; and; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2007-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/3273/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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:ehl:lserod:3273

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