Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008–2011

Abstract

Recession may increase divorce through a stress mechanism, or reduce divorce by exacerbating cost barriers or strengthening family bonds. After establishing an individual-level model predicting U.S. women's divorce, the paper tests period effects, and whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce using the 2008-2011 American Community Survey. Results show a downward spike in the divorce rate after 2008, almost recovering to the expected level by 2011, which suggests a negative recession effect. On the other hand, state foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce with individual controls, although this effect is not significant when state fixed effects are introduced. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. Future research will have to determine why national divorce odds fell during the recession while state-level economic indicators were not strongly associated with divorce. Exploratory analysis which shows unemployment decreasing divorce odds for those with college degrees, while foreclosures have the opposite effect, provides one possible avenue for such research.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010

“…After a slight dip in 2009—possibly a result of the Great Recession (Chowdury 2012; Cohen 2012; Schaller 2012)—the rise has continued, and 2011 has the highest divorce rate of any year to date. If we substitute 1980 as the standard population, the change becomes smaller but remains substantial: if the age distribution of married women in 2008 had been the same as it was in 1980, the divorce rate in 2008 would have been 25 % higher than in 1980.…”

Socioeconomic Variation in the Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage and Nonmarital Fertility in the United States: Evidence From the Great Recession

“…This state-level unemployment data is drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program, which publishes monthly unemployment rates for every state and the District of Columbia. These data have been widely used in recent studies of recession effects (e.g., Cohen 2014;Pilkauskas et al 2012).…”

Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession

“…This approach is attractive because aggregate-level measures are plausibly exogenous to individual characteristics (insofar as individual-level relationship quality is unlikely to cause area-level unemployment and other omitted individual-level characteristics are unlikely to cause shocks to area-level unemployment and changes in relationship quality), and thus do not have the same problems of reverse causality or omitted variables bias that plague individual-level measures. This approach follows a long line of literature examining the relationship between area-level unemployment and individual-level outcomes (i.e., Giuliano and Spilimbergo 2014; Hoynes 2002; Ruhm 2000), as well as a more recent set of studies examining the effects of the Great Recession on families and well-being (i.e., Cohen 2014; Latif 2014; Pilkauskas et al 2012). …”