Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results
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- Justin Wolfers
- The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and National Bureau of Economic Research.
説明
<jats:p>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 divorce spiked following the adoption of unilateral 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.</jats:p>
収録刊行物
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- American Economic Review
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American Economic Review 96 (5), 1802-1820, 2006-11-01
American Economic Association
