As nuclear families have become increasingly less stable over the past quarter century, married couples have been faced with the difficult task of negotiating the terms by which marriage is ended. For parents, divorce involves questions revolving around the care and sustenance of children. In this paper we investigate whether observed divorce settlements indicate that parents make trade-offs in...

This analysis extends H. Elizabeth Peters’ “Marriage and Divorce: Information Constraints and Private Contracting” (1986). Peters introduced two models of marital bargaining. We argue those models may be viewed as special cases of a single, threedimensional framework. The third dimension represents the transaction costs of intramarital exchange. The transaction-cost model illustrates that chang...

Marriage is a risky undertaking that people enter with incomplete information about their partner and their future life circumstances. A large literature has shown how new information gained from unforeseen but long-lasting or permanent changes in life circumstances may trigger a divorce. We extend this literature by considering how information gained from a temporary change in life circumstanc...

BACKGROUND Divorce has been linked with poor physical and mental health outcomes among civilians. Given the unique stressors experienced by U.S. service members, including lengthy and/or multiple deployments, this study aimed to examine the associations of recent divorce on health and military outcomes among a cohort of U.S. service members. METHODS Millennium Cohort participants from the fir...

Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman’s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women’s average household income. Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of marital...

OBJECTIVE We examine whether having an affair around the time a marriage broke up is associated with being the person who wanted the divorce more or the person who was left. We also examine predictors of having an affair around the end of the marriage. METHODS We use the National Survey of Families and Households, using each ex-spouse's reports of which spouse wanted the divorce more and whet...

Studies involving parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have reported negative relationship outcomes for some couples and positive others, indicating the need to determine moderators link between stress divorce. This study aims examine moderating effect partner supportive dyadic coping, i.e., interpersonal coping that involves providing comfort, empathy, or practical advice on...

One in two marriages in the United States ends in divorce. Close to 30% of children under 18 live in single-parent households. Disruption of many traditional households raises the question of how divorce affects children’s later outcomes. This paper investigates the impacts of parental divorce on children’s educational and labor market outcomes, and studies the mitigating effects associated wit...