Stevenson, Betsey; Wolfers, Justin --- "Trends in Marital Stability" [2011] ELECD 596; in Cohen, R. Lloyd; Wright, D. Joshua (eds), "Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law

Editor(s): Cohen, R. Lloyd; Wright, D. Joshua

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848444379

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Trends in Marital Stability

Author(s): Stevenson, Betsey; Wolfers, Justin

Number of pages: 13

Extract:

4 Trends in marital stability*
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers


1. INTRODUCTION

This chapter documents trends in marital stability over recent decades. Our assessment is
motivated by a desire to update earlier analyses with the latest data, as well as an attempt
to reconcile apparently conflicting results. The reconciliation points to an unequivocal
increase in marital stability since the 1970s.
Stevenson and Wolfers (2007) analyzed retrospective marital histories from the 2001
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), finding that first marriages occur-
ring in each decade since the 1970s have been less likely to end in divorce than marriages
begun in the preceding decade. This analysis (as originally published) is presented in
Figure 4.1. The finding of a lower likelihood of divorce among those who married in
recent decades appears to hold irrespective of how many years into these marriages one
assesses the cumulative divorce rate. The U.S. Census Bureau (2005) also analyzed these
data and their analysis of the survival of first marriages at each anniversary (a function
of both divorce and death), reproduced as Table 4.1, points to a similar trend of more
stable marriages among those who wed in recent decades.
More recently released marital history data from the 2004 SIPP has been analyzed by
the U.S. Census Bureau (2007a). In contrast to what was previously found, their tables
suggest that there has been a recent rise in marital instability for marriages of all durations
and that both first and second marriages ...