Parental Divorce in Australia, Cohorts Born 1900 - 1975

M. D. R. Evans () and Jonathan Kelley ()
Additional contact information
M. D. R. Evans: Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: This paper examines the sources of parental divorce in Australia using respondents' retrospective reports of parents' behaviour in the IsssA-Pool database, a pooled series of representative national samples of Australia conducted between 1984 and 2002 (N=19,601 valid cases for this analysis). We analyse the probability of divorce using logistic regression models. The results include a very large effect of time, with people reaching age 14 before the Family Law Act took effect being much less likely to grow up in divorced families, even net of a wide variety of other social and economic changes over time. Important also are several indicators of family traditionalism: Parents from the Mediterranean countries and parents who are faithful church-goers have more stable marriages. The effects of gender and of size of place are ambiguous: they are marginally significant statistically, and small, to boot. Parental social class has little, if any, effect, except that parents at the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are probably less likely than those in the middle to divorce. Family size and religious denomination do not have significant effects on the probability of divorce in these models. Finally, there is a very large connection between maternal employment and parental divorce; we cannot disentangle the causality here, but can establish a (large) upper bound on the effect of maternal employment on divorce.

Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2004-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/downloads ... series/wp2004n22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iae:iaewps:wp2004n22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sheri Carnegie ().