Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces

Abstract

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage. Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining "shotgun marriages". Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life. We present evidence on some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the birth control pill and women's control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology. We note that recent changes in family forms demand a reassessment of theories of the family and argue that consumption complementarities may be an increasingly important component of marriage. Finally, we discuss how these facts should inform family policy debates.JEL Codes: D1, H31, I3, J1, K36, N3

Mariage mixte, contexte des valeurs et rupture d’union: Suède 1990–2005

“…Antill 1983;Kurdek and Schmitt 1987), as well as from economic models emphasizing consumption complementarities (e.g. shared leisure activities or joint consumption of public goods) as an important gain to marriage (Becker 1991;Stevenson and Wolfers 2007). In dissimilar unions the number of joint activities is reduced, as is the degree of mutual confirmation of values.…”

Depressive symptoms in the Belgian population: disentangling age and cohort effects

“…A decline of traditional institutions like family, community, and religious groups [56], and a rise in the rate of divorce [60], single-parent families, and loneliness [56], i.e. a decrease in social relationships, social capital, and social networks, is associated with an increase in depression, anxiety, suicide, and unhappiness [53,56].…”

Relationship Status Among Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Population-Based Study

“…The shifts in diagnostic criteria of ASDs over the past 25 years suggest that these samples may only reflect those children with ASD who are severely impacted, since diagnoses such as Asperger Syndrome only began being formally diagnosed in the United States in 1994 (Klin et al 1995). An updated examination of family structure is also necessary due to the decrease in overall divorce rates over time, which reached its lowest rate in 2005 since 1970 (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007).…”