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

Elizabeth O. 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 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.

JEL-codes: J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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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:ehl:lserod:51601

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