Lost jobs, broken marriages

Abstract

• ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change. Established in 1989 to identify, explain, model and forecast social change in Britain at the individual and household level, the Centre specialises in research using longitudinal data.• ESRC UK Longitudinal Centre. This national resource centre was established in October 1999 to promote the use of longitudinal data and to develop a strategy for the future of large-scale longitudinal surveys. It was responsible for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and for the ESRC's interest in the National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study• European Centre for Analysis in the Social Sciences. ECASS is an interdisciplinary research centre which hosts major research programmes and helps researchers from the EU gain access to longitudinal data and cross-national datasets from all over Europe.The British Household Panel Survey is one of the main instruments for measuring social change in Britain. The BHPS comprises a nationally representative sample of around 5,500 households and over 10,000 individuals who are reinterviewed each year. The questionnaire includes a constant core of items accompanied by a variable component in order to provide for the collection of initial conditions data and to allow for the subsequent inclusion of emerging research and policy concerns.Among the main projects in ISER's research programme are: the labour market and the division of domestic responsibilities; changes in families and households; modelling households' labour force behaviour; wealth, well-being and socio-economic structure; resource distribution in the household; and modelling techniques and survey methodology.BHPS data provide the academic community, policymakers and private sector with a unique national resource and allow for comparative research with similar studies in Europe, the United States and Canada.BHPS data are available from the Data Archive at the University of Essex http://www.data-archive.ac.ukFurther information about the BHPS and other longitudinal surveys can be obtained by telephoning +44 (0) 1206 873543. ABSTRACTThe objective of this paper is to examine the effect of a spouse's job loss on the probability that his/her marriage ends in divorce. Previous empirical studies on this matter are sparse, and the results inconclusive. Moreover, all previous studies focus on the short-term effects. A unique Swedish data set is used, containing all married couples where one of the spouses was displaced, due to an establishment closure, and an appropriate comparison group. I provide further evidence that the adverse consequences of a job loss cannot be measured in monetary terms alone, and extend the current literature on the impact of job loss (unemployment) on marital instability by also investigate the impact in the long run. The results suggest the existence of a destabilizing impact on marriages from both husbands', and wives', job losses, and both in the short and the longer run.JEL Classification: J12, J65

Your spouse is fired! How much do you care?

“…The interaction term between the attrition dummy and the spousal job loss variable is also statistically insignificant for both genders, thus demonstrating that the cross-partner spillovers that we identify are not disproportionally higher or lower for survey dropouts. 16,17 A related issue arises from the fact that partners may drop from the sample due to divorce or separation, which could be partly induced by the job loss episode (Doiron and Mendolia 2012;Eliason 2012;Hansen 2005;Rege et al 2007). By construction, our sample comprises cohabiting couples, which may be a self-selected sample of all couples experiencing unemployment.…”

A Review of the Recent Trends in the Relationship between Unemployment and Families

“…It showed that the effect of the Great Recession increased the cost effect of divorce, and in several cases, the loss of job led to the increase of maintenance of one household over two households; this was primarily associated with decline in divorce rate (Artazcoz, Benach, Borrell, & Cortès, 2004). The interpretation of these outcomes points to the meaning of employment being within and beyond the source for income (Eliason, 2012). While in general job losses increase the chances of divorce, the nature of job loss is usually significant in understanding significance of marital dissolution.…”

The Debate About the Consequences of Job Displacement

“…Accordingly, marital dissolution results from the decline in husbands' indispensability because their spouses (or perhaps they themselves) consider them to be failing to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role. Support for this thesis is provided by a study from Sweden which finds large risks of divorce after displacement in couples where men lost their jobs but no significant effects if women were displaced (Eliason 2012(Eliason : 1392. Accordingly, if unemployment stigmatizes men more strongly than women in Scandinavian countries where mothers are highly involved in the labor market and often work full-time, we may assume that the effect is even stronger in Switzerland where mothers are less strongly attached to the labor market.…”