Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP6228
Authors: Elizabeth O. Ananat; Guy Michaels
Abstract: Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman?s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital break-up on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women?s average household income. Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of marital break-up throughout the income distribution, however, we find that divorce greatly increases the probability that a woman lives in a household with income in the bottom quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal earnings with child support, welfare, combining households, and substantially increasing their labour supply, divorce significantly increases the odds that a woman with children is poor.
Keywords: divorce; poverty
JEL Codes: I32; J12; J13; J16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| having a female firstborn child (J13) | likelihood of a woman's first marriage breaking up (J12) |
| marital breakup (J12) | household income distribution (D31) |
| marital breakup (J12) | poverty rates for women with children (I32) |
| divorce (J12) | increased inequality among women with children (I24) |
| marital breakup (J12) | probability of a mother in the bottom quartile of income (I32) |