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Free to Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes

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  • Fernández, Raquel
  • Wong, Joyce Cheng
Abstract
During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefited and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor force participation (LFP), and marriage and divorce decisions subject to several shocks and given a particular divorce regime. We calibrate the model using statistics relevant to the life-cycle of the 1940 cohort. Conditioning solely on gender, our ex ante welfare analysis finds that women would fare better under mutual consent whereas men would prefer a unilateral system. Once we condition not only on gender but also on initial productivity, we find that men in the top three quintiles of the initial productivity distribution are made better off by a unilateral system as are the top two quintiles of women; the rest prefer mutual consent. We also find that although the change in divorce regime had only a small effect on the LFP of married women in the 1940 cohort, these effects would be considerably larger for a cohort who lived its entire life under a unilateral divorce system.

Suggested Citation

  • Fernández, Raquel & Wong, Joyce Cheng, 2014. "Free to Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes," CEPR Discussion Papers 10047, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10047
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Doepke, M. & Tertilt, M., 2016. "Families in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1789-1891, Elsevier.
    2. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/5kmb4ke32h9ur9159sab6hvkck is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Raquel Fern?ndez & Joyce Wong, 2014. "Unilateral Divorce, the Decreasing Gender Gap, and Married Women's Labor Force Participation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 342-347, May.
    4. Fatih Guvenen & Michelle Rendall, 2015. "Women's Emancipation through Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 18(4), pages 931-956, October.
    5. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/5kmb4ke32h9ur9159sab6hvkck is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Alfred Galichon & Scott Kominers & Simon Weber, 2014. "An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility," Working Papers hal-03460155, HAL.
    7. Alfred Galichon & Scott Kominers & Simon Weber, 2014. "An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility," Working Papers hal-03460155, HAL.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Divorce; Gender inequality; Household bargaining; Life-cycle behavior;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • K36 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Family and Personal Law

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