Abstract:
In response to the changing family and social structures in the United States, an
accurate understanding of mechanisms and the driving forces of marrital dissolution is
important in many aspects. For one, the knowledge helps policy and law makers to
conjecture possible results of the legislation (e.g. unilateral divorce law, child alimony,
or child custody), and the welfare system (e.g. welfare benefits to children and women
after divorce) on marriages, divorces, and labor supply. Our goal is to provide additional
evidence to a debatable issue in labor and family economics: Does married women's
labor supply increases the chance of their future divorces? or is the relationship the
other way around? Prior studies have produced conflicting results. We first propose
and estimate a dynamic model, namely a divorce hazard analysis, that allows us to
predict the risks of marital dissolution at different stages during the marital life course
as a function of endogenous wife's labor supply. By estimating the proposed model on
a more recent data set, the NLSY79, we hope to address econometrics issues occured
in earlier studies, as well as present new evidence for these competing claims.
