No-Fault Divorce and the Compression of Marriage Ages

We examine the impact of the introduction of no-fault divorce law on the behaviour of never-married people. In particular, we evaluate how it affects an indicator of marital search intensity, the age at first marriage, in the context of a model where everyone has a different value of marriage. The heterogeneity of individual values implies that the legal change affects different people differently. In particular, no-fault divorce has an ambiguous effect on average marital search intensity, but an unambiguously negative effect on the variance of search intensity. We test this hypothesis with a large data set of American marriage records from 1970 to 1995. We find support for our prediction, controlling for state-level heterogeneity and for time trends, the standard deviation of the log age at first marriage drops by approximately five percent with the introduction of no-fault divorce. Given our model, the mean age of first marriage is an indicator of welfare over the transition. We find that the mean age at first marriage increases slightly, suggesting that the mean person is slightly worse off with no-fault divorce. ∗ Communications to Doug Allen: email [email protected]. Thanks to Peg Brinig, Ken Kasa, Clyde Reed, and to seminar participants at Montana State, George Mason, and Western Washington Universities for their comments.