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Title: Revisiting Gruber (2004): Does growing up in a unilateral divorce regime really lead to negative later life outcomes?
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2006
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Abstract: While divorce rates peaked in the 1980s, an estimated 33% of first marriages now end in divorce orseparation within the first 10 years of marriage and debates over the effects of divorce laws are still verymuch alive. While there is a plethora of research documenting the effect of divorce on children, there hasbeen relatively little empirical work seeking to assess the effect of the divorce legislation on children andlater life outcomes. This paper seeks to narrow this gap in the literature by revisiting earlier results and byproviding updated evidence on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on child outcomes. It builds onJonathon Grubers 2004 paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics, which, in addition toaddressing the effect of unilateral divorce on divorce rates, looks at the effect of unilateral divorce exposureboth as a child and as an adult on a variety of outcomes including education, income, marriage and suicide.In order to test the robustness of Grubers estimates and to assess whether these trends persist with theinclusion of more recent data, I first replicate his results as precisely as possible. Then, I extend Grubersanalysis by including 2000 census data which was not available at the time of his publication. While myreplication of Gruber is not perfect, for the most part, I am reasonably successful in replicating his majorfindings using data from the 1960-1990 time period. In my extension, I find many of the updated resultsfound using the 1960-2000 timeframe to be smaller in magnitude and, in many instances, much less precisethan those estimated with the original sample. Updated results still provide evidence of a positive, albeitsmaller, effect of current unilateral divorce exposure on divorce probabilities. However, contrary toGrubers findings, I find little evidence of strong negative effects of youth exposure to unilateral divorce on later life outcomes once the 2000 data are included.
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Authors: Rouse, Katy
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Institution: University of North Carolina
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Publisher Location: Chapel Hill, NC
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
Countries: United States