The divorce rate is a poor indicator of marital instability because many marital disruptions never become divorces. This paper provides the first estimate of the rate of marital disruption in the U.S. in 1860 – 1948. In the long run, the cohort rate of marital disruption increased from about 10% in the mid-1860s to about 30% in the 1940s. Marital disruption rate was similar to the divorce rate ...

The post-1980 decline in the crude divorce rate must be interpreted in the context of the long-term trend and in terms of what we know about composition effects on crude measures-particularly given shifts in age at marriage and the age composition effects of the baby boom. Data from the June 1985 Current Population Survey permit more detailed, exposure-specific measurements as well as the use o...

We study women’s and men’s marital disruption in Italy between 1970 and 2003. By applying an event-history analysis to the 2003 Italian variant of the Generations and Gender Survey we found that the spread of marital disruption started among middlehighly educated women. Then in recent years it appears that less educated women have also been able to dissolve their unhappy unions. Overall we can ...

We use data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (N 1⁄4 4,547) to investigate racial and ethnic differences in risk factors for marital disruption, with a particular emphasis on premarital cohabitation. We find that the nature and strength of the estimated effects of several risk factors for disruption differ across groups. In particular, premarital cohabitation is positively associat...

We use data from the Current Population Survey to investigate racial differences in recent patterns of marital disruption. Although a leveling in the trend of disruption has occurred for White women since 1980, our results suggest less stabilization in rates of disruption among Black women. We also observe significant differences by race in the effects of key compositional factors on the risk o...