Divorce: what does learning have to do with it?∗

Learning about marriage quality has been proposed as a key mechanism for explaining how the probability of divorce evolves with marriage duration, and why people often cohabit before getting married. I develop four theoretical models of divorce, three of which include learning. I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to test reduced form implications of these models. The data is inconsistent with models including a substantial amount of learning. On the other hand, the data is consistent with a model without any learning, but where marriage quality changes over time. ∗I want to thank Jeff Campbell, Kerwin Charles, Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Analia Schlosser and Rob Shimer for helpful comments on previous versions of this draft. I also want to thank seminar participants at the University of Chicago, CEPR Ammersee 2008, SOLE 2009, NBER Summer Institute 2009 for useful comments.