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Title: Did the baby boom cause the US divorce boom?

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2020

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Abstract: The United States experienced two major demographic 'booms' during the second half of the twentieth century, in births after the second world war and in divorces 25 years later. This paper argues that the two booms are linked. As the baby-boom generations were entering marriageable age, men in previous cohorts were faced with exceptionally good remarriage prospects motivating them to rematch. The cohorts who ultimately divorced most were the ones with the biggest increase in remarriage opportunities for men. Using cross-state variation in the size of the baby-boom, I show that marriages in the pre-boom generations were more likely to divorce the bigger the relative supply of young women. This conclusion is robust to instrumenting the size of the baby-boom with WWII mobilization rates. Lastly, I construct a simple dynamic marriage market model which can generate a divorce boom caused by a baby-boom, and can account for between a fifth and a third of the rise in divorces in the 1970s.

Url: https://terezaranosova.com/Ranosova_agepref_draft.pdf

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Authors: Ranošová, Tereza

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Reproductive and Sexual Health, Work, Family, and Time

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