The effect of marital breakup on the income distribution of women with children

Ananat, Elizabeth O. and Michaels, Guy ORCID: 0000-0002-8796-4536 (2007) The effect of marital breakup on the income distribution of women with children. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP0787). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.

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Abstract

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 breakup throughout the income distribution, however, we find that divorce greatly increases the probability that a woman lives in a household with income in the bottom quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal earnings with child support, welfare, combining households, and substantially increasing their labor supply, divorce significantly increases the odds that a woman with children is poor.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/series.asp?...
Additional Information:	© 2007 The Authors
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
JEL classification:	J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J12 - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
Date Deposited:	09 Aug 2013 08:56
Last Modified:	13 Sep 2024 20:05
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/51601

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