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Background: Children who experience parental divorce have worse long-term educational attainment than children living in intact families. Less clear is the extent to which heterogeneity in the divorce penalty depends on parents' socioeconomic background and contextual characteristics. Objective: This study focuses on the negative consequences of parental divorce for children's tertiary education attainment, their heterogeneity by parental socioeconomic background, and variation across time and space. Methods: Single-level and multi-level linear probability models are estimated on several data sources in a comparative analysis of European countries and US regions. Different operationalizations of parental divorce are employed, including both marital and non-marital dissolutions. Results: Results show a stronger negative association between parental divorce and the probability of obtaining a university degree for children of highly educated parents. This holds across different birth cohorts in both Europe and the United States, largely irrespective of the country or region of residence, the dataset, and the operationalization of divorce and parental education. Higher divorce and university enrollment rates increase the absolute size of the divorce penalty, but do not substantially alter its pattern of heterogeneity. Conclusions: Children of high-SES families have more to lose in terms of the family resources relevant to achieving a university degree and are thus more negatively affected by parental divorce. Contribution: The finding that the association between parental divorce and children's educational attainment is stronger for children of highly educated parents across a variety of social and institutional environments has implications for the role of divorce in the reproduction of social inequalities.

Background: In this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children's educational attainment by parental education. Objective: The study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary education attainment varies by socioeconomic background, and whether it depends on the societal context. Methods: Data are drawn from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey, covering 14 countries. We estimate multi-level random-slope models for the completion of tertiary education. Results: The results show that parental divorce is negatively associated with children's tertiary education attainment. Across the 14 countries considered in this study, children of separated parents have a probability of achieving a university degree that is on average seven percentage points lower than that of children from intact families. The breakup penalty is stronger for children of highly educated parents, and is independent of the degree of diffusion of divorce. In countries with early selection into educational tracks, divorce appears to have more negative consequences for the children of poorly educated mothers. Conclusions: For children in most countries, parental divorce is associated with a lower probability of attaining a university degree. The divorce penalty is larger for children with highly educated parents. This equalizing pattern is accentuated in countries with a comprehensive educational system. Comments: Future research on the heterogeneous consequences of parental divorce should addressthe issue of self-selection into divorce, which might lead to an overestimation of the negative effect of divorce on students with highly educated parents. It should also further investigate the micro mechanisms underlying the divorce penalty.

The aim of this article is to analyse the determinants of marriage dissolution in Spain and their variation over time for women married between 1949 and 2006. Data are drawn from the Survey of Fertility, Family and Values of 2006. The article analyses the transition from first marriage to marital dissolution for couples who married in two eras: one prior to the Divorce Law of 1981, during which social and legal barriers to dissolution were many, and one in the period after the law was introduced, during which barriers to marriage dissolution were far fewer. Analyses are conducted using a continuous time event history model. The results indicate some similarities between Spain and other countries, such as the positive relationship between the typical features of unconventional families and marital dissolution, but also some specific differences, such as an increase in the importance of premarital pregnancy and/or not having children. It is also important to stress the declining importance of socio-economic variables, such as education and the labour market situation of women.