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Title: Why Have Divorce Rates Fallen? The Role of Womens Age at Marriage
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2011
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Abstract: Divorce rates rose throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, peaked around 1980, and have fallen ever since. In this paper, I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation(SIPP) and 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), along with four different empirical methods, to demonstrate that age at marriage is the main proximate cause of the decrease in divorce for cohorts marrying from 1980 to 2004. That is, although factors such as female labor force participation and access to reproductive technology almost certainly caused changes in the family, these and other driving forces largely impacted divorce by changing age at marriage. I further develop an economic model to demonstrate the historical consistencyof my findings. The model demonstrates that as the gains to marriage decrease, the contemporaneous divorce rate will increase but future marriages will become more stable. Thus, the model explains how monotone decreases in the gains from marriage over the second half of the 20th century can imply a rise and subsequent fall in divorce rates.
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Authors: Rotz, Dana
Publisher: Harvard University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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