Female Education and Marriage Dissolution: Is it a Selection Effect?

Divorce risk factors and their variation over time in Spain

“…This strategy notably reduces the amount of missing data (n=8,759, 6,246 ever married). The results using the two subsamples showed the same trends for the main variables (Bernardi and Martínez-Pastor 2010). We also compared the distributions of the variables for education and civil status in the original sample and the analytic sample with valid information on marital and employment history, and with data from the Spanish Labour Force Survey in 2006 (see Appendix Table A1).…”

“…Sample selection occurs when unobserved factors that influence the process of interest (marriage dissolution in our case) help to determine whether that process (marriage) is observed in the first place (Breen 1996). In a companion paper (Bernardi and Martínez-Pastor 2010), we have examined in detail the implications of selection into marriage with regard to the effect of education on marriage dissolution. We do not consider this type of process here.…”

The long-term consequences of parental divorce for children’s educational attainment

“…If, for instance, highly educated parents are less likely to divorce and do so only when there is a very high degree of conflict in the relationship, then their children might be selected on negative unobserved characteristics that might also explain their larger penalty in educational attainment. To complicate matters further, the educational gradient has changed over time from positive to negative, making it difficult to predict the implications for the potential biases due to selection into divorce in a cross-cohort study like this one (Bernardi and Martínez Pastor 2011;Härkönen and Dronkers 2006;Matysiak, Styrc, and Vignoli 2011). These concluding observations suggest the need for additional research on the social background gradient in the divorce penalty which draws on more information about the social background of both parents, and which is based on research designs that permit the analysis of the endogenous nature of divorce when studying its consequences.…”

The Influence of Educational Expansion on Partnership Stability: A Cohort Study of First Partnerships in Switzerland

“…Educational expansion can only explain increasing partnership breakup rates if greater individual educational attainment increases the risk of separation and if this positive educational gradient has remained stable over time. However, a large and growing line of research stresses that the association between educational attainment and partnership behavior depends upon the social and historical context (Teachman 2002;de Graaf and Kalmijn 2006;Härkönen and Dronkers 2006;Martin 2006;Bernardi and Martínez-Pastor 2011;Kalmijn 2013;Matysiak et al 2014;Puur et al 2016). The working assumption of this article is that three different factors have contributed to lowering the initially positive educational gradient of first partnership breakups.…”

“…When such impediments are prevalent, therefore, less educated individuals can be expected to be less likely to live in NMC, or to divorce once they have married. As the diffusion of NMC and divorce increases and social hurdles are lessened, however, these groups become more likely to adopt such behaviors (Härkönen and Dronkers 2006;Bernardi and Martínez-Pastor 2011;Ní Bhrolcháin and Beaujouan 2013;Maslauskaitė and Baublytė 2015;Puur et al 2016).…”