We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results.
- Authors
WOLFERS, JUSTIN
- Abstract
Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to explicitly model the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the legal regime. When accounting for these dynamics, I find that unilateral divorced spiked following the adoption of universal divorce laws, but that this rise largely reversed itself within a decade. Overall, these changes in family law explain very little of the rise in divorce over the past half-century. (JEL C78, J12).
- Subjects
UNITED States; NO-fault divorce; DIVORCE law; DIVORCE; VITAL statistics; STATISTICAL reliability
- Publication
American Economic Review, 2006, Vol 96, Issue 5, p1802
- ISSN
0002-8282
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1257/aer.96.5.1802