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Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results.
- Source :
- American Economic Review; Dec2006, Vol. 96 Issue 5, p1802-1820, 19p, 6 Charts, 7 Graphs
- Publication Year :
- 2006
-
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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- NO-fault divorce
DIVORCE law
DIVORCE
VITAL statistics
STATISTICAL reliability
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00028282
- Volume :
- 96
- Issue :
- 5
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- American Economic Review
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 23262662
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.96.5.1802