Married Womens Labor Force Participation As Divorce Insurance

If married women view participation in the labor force as providing insurance against the negative economic consequences of divorce, then married women with higher expectations of divorce will be more likely to be employed. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1968-1983, is used to estimate the effect of the expectation of divorce on the labor force participation decision of married women. The longitudinal nature of the data is used to estimate the probability of divorce for each married woman in the sample. Labor force participation is then modelled as dependent on the individual's expectation of future divorce. The empirical results confirm that expectation of divorce increases labor force participation of married women.

Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depended critically on laws governing property division, I show that these results are not robust to alternative specifications and controls. I find instead that unilateral divorce led to an increase in both married and unmarried female labor force participation, regardless of the pre-existing laws regarding property division.

The U.S. divorce rate experienced a sharp increase between 1960 and 1980. Similarly, an upward trend is observed in the female labor force participation rate. Observing that these rates ran in a similar direction, economists began to probe the relationship between the two events and their research has led to conclusive evidence that a positive relationship exists between female labor force participation and divorce. The goal of this thesis is to determine the extent to which female labor participation during a marriage affects the subsequent likelihood of divorce, and to assess the effects of female income, financial autonomy, and marital bargaining power on the probability of divorce. Using data from waves 1968 to 2007 of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I estimate several fixed effects linear probability models that lead to the conclusion that a woman's employment status, financial independence, and bargaining power are positively correlated with divorce.

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depended critically on laws governing property division, I show that these results are not robust to alternative specifications and controls. I find instead that unilateral divorce led to an increase in both married and unmarried female labor force participation, regardless of the underlying property laws.

This book considers how women cope with the economic hardship which accompanies divorce, using national longitudinal data on a generation of women in the United States. These women came of age at a time when they were expected to give priority to family roles over work roles. Yet by the time many of them were divorced in the 1970s, with the climate of changing perceptions of gender roles, women were expected to work, and were unprepared for the economic disruption caused by divorce. Peterson analyzes the experiences of women drawing upon sociological and economic approaches to the study of labor market outcomes, and of life-cycle events. He shows how over the long term most divorced women can make at least a partial recovery, but divorced women with children have a more difficult time making work adjustments, and experience greater economic deprivation. Given the continuing high rates of divorce, Peterson's findings highlight the importance of work rather than marriage for women's economic security.

What sort of contract is marriage? What does it offer the parties? What are the difficulties of enforcement, and the result of failed effective enforcement? This book takes an economic approach to marriage and divorce, considering the key role of incentives in family law: it highlights the possible adverse consequences emanating from faulty legal design, while demonstrating that good family law should provide incentives for consistent and honest behavior. Economists, specialists in the economic analysis of law, and academic lawyers discuss recent advances in specialist work on marriage, cohabitation, and divorce. Chapters are grouped around four topics: the contractual perspectives on marriage commitment; the regulatory framework surrounding divorce; bargaining and commitment issues relating to marriage and near-marriage arrangements; and finally empirical work, which focuses on the impact of more liberal divorce laws. This important new study will be of considerable interest to lawyers, policy-makers and economists concerned with family law.

Over the past 35 years the gap in poverty between divorced and married women increased from 2:1 (in 1967) to 4:1 (in 2001). Despite high poverty rates, divorced women are no less educated than married women. Labor market earnings are a particularly important source of income for elderly divorced women; Divorced women's level of labor force participation is comparable to that of married men; however, retirement of divorced women experiences no spike at ages 62 and 65, as is the case for married men. Divorced women are quite distinct from separated women, with the latter much less educated, lower income, and minority; grouping these two populations together, as is often done, is a mistake. Initial analyses suggest that the reduction in the requirement on length of marriage from 20 to 10 years to receive Social Security divorcee benefits had little or no effect on alleviating divorcee poverty. A large number of questions remain unanswered, but given the speed at which the cohorts with high prevalence of divorce are approaching old age, the time is now to address these questions.