Fragile Employment,Liquid Love: Employment Instability and Divorce in Israel

The study examines the relationship between the employment stability of first-marriage couples and risk of divorce in Israel. This research question is of particular interest owing to the centrality of the family in Israeli society, rising divorce rates, and increasing employment instability and “deregulation” of the labor market. We capture employment instability through two dimensions: the pattern of employment instability within couples and the continuity of each partner’s employment instability. We utilize this conceptualization to identify the link between employment instability and divorce, focusing on gender and socioeconomic resources. Data were from combined Israeli census files for 1995–2008, annual administrative employment records from the National Insurance Institute and the Tax Authority, and the Civil Registry of Divorce (N = 10,891 couples). Using a series of discrete-time event-history analysis models, findings indicate that husbands’ employment instability, especially when wives have stable employment, increases the risk of divorce; employment stability continuity has opposite gender effects on that risk; and the effect of employment instability on divorce remains significant after taking into account household economic resources. The findings reveal asymmetric gender patterns of the effect of employment instability on divorce, beyond the socioeconomic resources of the household.     

The impact of job loss on family dissolution

The impact of involuntary job displacements on the probability of divorce is analysed using discrete duration models. The analysis uses the sample of couples from the British Household Panel Survey and distinguishes between types of displacements. Results show that couples in which the husband experiences a job loss are more likely to divorce. Redundancies have small, positive, often insignificant and short-lived effects while dismissals and temporary job endings have larger positive impacts. This is consistent with the interpretation of redundancies as capturing negative income shocks while other types of job loss also convey new information about potential future earnings and match quality.     

The impact of job loss on family dissolution

The impact of involuntary job displacements on the probability of divorce is analysed using discrete duration models. The analysis uses the sample of couples from the British Household Panel Survey and distinguishes between types of displacements. Results show that couples in which the husband experiences a job loss are more likely to divorce. Redundancies have small, positive, often insignificant and short-lived effects while dismissals and temporary job endings have larger positive impacts. This is consistent with the interpretation of redundancies as capturing negative income shocks while other types of job loss also convey new information about potential future earnings and match quality.     

The joint effects of marriage partners’ socioeconomic positions on the risk of divorce

This study investigated the joint effects of spouses' socioeconomic positions on the risk of divorce in Finland. For couples in which both partners were at the lowest educational level, the risk of divorce was lower than could be expected on the basis of the previously documented overall inverse association between each spouse's education and the risk of divorce. Women who were employed or were homemakers, and who had employed husbands, had comparatively stable marriages; couples in which the husband, the wife, or both partners were unemployed had an elevated risk of divorce. A husband's high income decreased the risk of divorce, and a wife's high income increased the risk at all levels of the other spouse's income, but especially when the wife's income exceeded the husband's.     

Hiv status and union dissolution in Sub-saharan Africa: The case of Rakai,Uganda

Little is known about the impact of HIV infection on the disruption of families through separation, divorce, and widowhood. Using life tables and multinomial logistic regression, this research examined the influence of HIV status on the risk of separation or divorce and widowhood among women in Rakai, Uganda. The multivariate results revealed that dissolution is more common among HIV-infected women and that infected women in HIV-discordant couples are especially likely to face separation or divorce than women in other HIV-status couples. These results highlight women's vulnerability to the social impact of HIV infection and the importance of dyadic studies of the disruption of unions.     

Job characteristics of spouses and their work shifts

This study builds on an earlier finding from the May 1980 Current Population Survey that one-third of full-time dual-earner couples with children in the United States include at least one spouse who works other than a regular day shift. Using the same data source, the relevance of husbands’ and wives’ job characteristics (occupation and industry) on their shift work status are considered, and the nature of the association between husbands’ and wives’ work shifts is explored. Four alternative models are initially posed and tested with log-linear analysis; these models vary in the extent to which a spouse’s shift work status is contingent upon the job characteristics of a husband or wife. None of these models fit the data. A modification of the simplest of the four models (using forward selection) is the best fitting model. It is not symmetrical: the wife’s shift is contingent upon both her occupation and industry and that of her husband, but the husband’s shift is contingent only upon his occupation and industry. There is a relationship between husband’s and wife’s shift, the direction of which depends upon the occupations of both spouses. This study demonstrates the importance of taking a “couple” perspective on shift work among married persons, and the need for models that include interaction effects.     

A theoretical analysis of antecedents of young couples’ fertility decisions and outcomes

Longitudinal survey data from 509 couples who at Time 1 interview had recently married or had their first child did not support the hypothesis that demographic factors influence fertility intentions, decisions, and outcomes only indirectly through their effects on attitudes and motivations. Husbands’ and wives’ attitudes exerted reciprocal influence on one another. However, while husbands’ sex-role traditionalism and motivation for parenthood strongly influenced wives’ traditionalism and motivation in the case of recently married couples, this pattern was reversed for riew parents. Birth control use was directly affected by wives’ fertility intentions, but not by husbands’ intentions. Difficulties in examining couple interaction variables such as relative power and the possible limitations of fitting these data to a complex theoretical model using LISREL are discussed.     

Couple childbearing desires, intentions, and births

Using new panel data from the National Surveys of Families and Households, I investigate the effects of wives’ and husbands’ childbearing desires on their spouses’ intentions, and the effects of spouses’ desires and intentions on subsequent births. The results show clearly that husbands’ desires and intentions influence couples’ births, with approximately equal force to that of wives’ desires and intentions. When couples disagreed about wanting a child, each partners’ intentions were shifted toward not having a child; and disagreement in desires or intentions were reflected in birth rates that were lower than average. These patterns were generally not different for couples with more or less traditional gender roles or attitudes.     

The resort to divorce in England and Wales, 1858–1957

This paper consists of a statistical analysis of the increasing resort to divorce in England and Wales over the past hundred years. In view of the social, financial and procedural barriers surrounding the Divorce Court over most of the period it is impossible to regard the spread of divorce as an index of increasing marital breakdown. It indicates merely the greater ability and willingness of estranged couples to take advantage of the legal machinery for bringing their marriages to a formal end.

The analysis of published data shows that since 1857, the rate of petitioning per 10,000 married couples (of whom the wives were 15–49 years of age) has risen from 0.83 to 37.98. Various factors have been responsible for this fifty-foild increase: it seems that a five-fold rise was due specifically to the lowering of formal barriers (which made divorce more accessible to the poor and to women petitioners), while the remaining tenfold increase was brought about by the growing acceptance by society and by discordant couples, of divorce as an appropriate end to a broken marriage. This change in public opinion can be seen not only in the slow yet persistent rise in the rate of petitioning over all but the last few years, but also in the long-term effects of the two world wars.

Divorces since 1921 have been allocated to the various marriage cohorts involved so as to estimate the proportion of each cohort divorced by successive marriage anniversaries. This procedure has shown that the recent war had its greaters disruptive impact on the “hastliy contracted” marriages of the early war years; the impact on these cohorts was, however, only slightly in excess of that exerted on the immediately preceding cohorts married in the later 1930's. In fact the war took its toll of all cohorts back to 1921.

As complement to this study of trends the position near the beginning and near the end of the whole period was investigated by analysing a special extraction of statistics relating to all the 1871 petitions and to a sample of those of 1951. The study of couples involved in divorce in these two years, illustrates its extension in the intervening period to most sectors of the married population. From a tiny group of predominantly well-to-do and frequently childless couples in 1871, the divorce population by 1951 appeared to have become very nearly a cross-section of all married couples, at least in respect to occupational structure and family size. To some extent, the close similarity between the divorcing and the still married couples in 1951 was a temporary phenomenon, due to the entry into the divorce courts in that year of an unuually large number of poor petitioners using the new legal aid provisions introduced in 1950. Nevertheless, there is good reasong to believe that this factor has led to only slight over-emphasis of the long-term trend for the poor and those with families to take an increasing share in divorce petitioning.

So far as the mid-twentieth century position is concerned cohort analysis shows that, at least in the early years of matrimony, the couples married since 1945 have petitioned for divorce less than their immediate elders in the wartime or just pre-war cohorts. While the post-war marriages have not run their full course through the most divorce-prone years, this finding suggests that the rate of petitioning is not likely to go on increasing in the future nearly so rapidly or so persistently as it has done in the past. It seems possible that the rate may be stabilized in the next few years at approximately its present level, i.e. within the range of 5%–10% of each marriage cohort. If this should occur, it would probably mean that divorce in England and Wales had found its own level, and that virtually all those requiring to terminate marriage in the existing context of social circumstances were no longer prevented by extraneous barriers from using the appropriate legal procedures.     

Cigarette smoking and widowhood in the United States

Abstract Extract In the United States, for newly married couples with husband aged 23 and wife 21 who never divorce or re-marry after death of spouse, expectation of married life increased by 10·1 years between 1910 and 1965. Expectation of widowed life decreased by 3·2 years for husbands, but, despite large mortality declines for both sexes, increased by 1·8 years for wives. These and related data are shown in Table 1.     

What Will You Do If I Say ‘I Do’?: The Effect of the Sex Ratio on Time Use within Taiwanese Married Couples

This paper uses the natural experiment of a large imbalance between men and women of marriageable age in Taiwan in the 1960s to test the hypothesis that higher sex ratios lead to husbands (wives) having a lower (higher) share of couple’s time in leisure and higher (lower) share of the couple’s total work time (employment, commuting, and housework). The sample includes 18,134 Taiwanese couples’ time diaries from 1987, 1990, and 1994. The OLS analysis finds evidence of the predicted effects of the county-level sex ratio on husbands’ and wives’ share of leisure and total work time. The county-level sex ratio’s impact on college-educated husbands’ time use is shown to be larger than the impact on non-college-educated husbands’ time use. A two-stage least square analysis controlling for possible endogeneity of county of residence returns similar findings.     

Not your lucky day: romantically and numerically special wedding date divorce risks

Characteristics of couples on or about their wedding day and characteristics of weddings have been shown to predict marital outcomes. Little is known, however, about how the dates of the weddings correlate with marriage durability. Using Dutch marriage and divorce registries from 1999 to 2013, this study compares the durations of marriages that began on unusually popular wedding dates with marriages on ordinary dates. We identify several distinct types of popular dates, including Valentine’s Day and numerically special days (dates with the same or sequential number values, e.g., 9.9.99, 1.2.03), showing that on an adjusted basis, the incidence of weddings on such dates was 137–509% higher than ordinary dates. The hazard odds of divorce for these special-date weddings were 18–36% higher than ordinary-date weddings. Sorting on couples’ observable characteristics accounts for some of the higher divorce risks, but even after controlling for these characteristics, special-date weddings were more vulnerable, with 10–17% higher divorce odds compared to ordinary dates. These relationships are even stronger for couples who have not married before.     

The influence of wives’ and husbands’ fertility preferences on progression to a third birth in Nepal, 1997–2009

As couples across the globe increasingly exercise conscious control over their reproduction, both spouses’ family-size preferences have the opportunity to influence their fertility. Using couple-level measures of rural Nepalese spouses’ family-size preferences and more than a decade of monthly panel data collected subsequently on fertility outcomes, we investigate how both spouses’ preferences influence progression to a third birth in a country where the widely professed ideal family size is two children. Contrary to expectations based on women's relative disadvantage, we find that it is wives’ preferences that drive couples’ progression to a third birth. We find also that the influence of wives’ preferences is not explained by contraceptive use but that this influence is moderated by couple communication about family planning. Wives’ preferences drive progression to a third birth among couples who had discussed how many children to have.     

The changing American family

This Bulletin documents recent changes in American family patterns resulting both from longterm trends in urbanization, industrialization, and economic growth and the disruption of the Great Depression and World War 2, as well as changed attitudes toward marriage, parenthood, divorce, and the roles of women. Following a postwar boom in the 1950s and 1960s, marriage rates have now fallen to levels observed in the early 20th century. Since 1970, the number of unmarried couples living together has more than tripled to 1.9 million in 1983. The divorce rate has now stabilized after more than doubling since 1960, but at the current level, 1/2 of all recent marriages will end in divorce. Most divorced persons remarry fairly quickly, often creating complex families of "step-relatives." With 19% of households with minor children now headed by a women with no husband present, up to 1/2 of all children will live for sometime in a fatherless family before age 18. Over 1/2 of all married women, including 49% of married mothers of preschool children, now hold a paid job outside the home. Working wives boost a family's income by an average 40% but still are expected to shoulder most responsiblility for home and childcare. White women now in their 20s say they expect to have an average of 2 children, but are delaying childbearing to such an extent that 29% could end up childless. Most of the elderly live on their own but usually near children whom they see frequently. Despite changes in traditional family patterns, Americans consistently report that a happy marriage and good family are the most important aspects of life. And though most Americans now live with few or no family members, they maintain active contact with a large network of family.     

The gender gap in the economic well-being of nonresident fathers and custodial mothers

Using a unique sample of couples with children, we estimate the gender gap in economic well-being after marital separation, something that previous studies of individuals who divorce have not been able to do. The income-to-needs levels of formerly married mothers are only 56% those of their former husbands. The postseparation gender gap is reduced if the wife was employed full-time and was an above-average earner before marital disruption. The gap is also relatively small among the least economically independent wives, those who were not employed before separation. For the latter group, the husband's relatively low income tends to reduce the gender gap.     

Dual-earner migration. Earnings gains, employment and self-selection

This paper examines how spouses in dual-earner couples weigh each partner’s expected wage growth in the decision to migrate. Previous research suggests that husbands’ job prospects dominate the migration choice irrespective of their relative earnings potential. Based on British panel data, this paper employs an endogenous switching model and estimates wage differentials of migrating vs. staying for husbands and wives corrected for double selectivity of migration and employment. Dual-earner couples attach a positive weight to each partner’s expected wage gains when deciding to migrate. Moreover, migrant wives’ employment decreases temporarily, and there are significant selection effects in migration and employment amongst non-migrants.     

Age at marriage as a variable in socio-economic differentials in fertility

Earlier studies have pointed out that socio-economic differentials in fertility depend upon both religion and farm background. These studies report a negative relation between fertility and socio-economic status for non-Catholic American couples in contrast to a positive relation for Catholics. Likewise, a negative differential for American couples with farm background has been observed in contrast to no differential for twogeneration urbanites. Age at marriage is a third such interaction variable: the strong negative socio-economic differential observed when wife’s age at marriage is under 19 diminishes with advancing age at marriage and becomes positive for wives who married at age 23 or older. Moreover, for both non-Catholics and Catholics, couples with and without farm background, the differential by wife’s education is negative when wife’s age at marriage is young, positive when her age at marriage is old. Both sociological factors (the incidence of non-familial adult roles) and differential fecundity appear to underlie the interaction. The analysis is based on reports of once-married, white, nonfarm wives aged 30 to 39 included in the 1955 or 1960 Growth of American Families Studies or the 1965 National Fertility Study (approximately 1,000 in each survey).     

Work shifts of full-time dual-earner couples: Patterns and contrasts by sex of spouse

Work shifts of full-time dual-earner couples are analyzed with data from the May 1980 U.S. Current Population Survey. Over 20 percent of husbands and about 12 percent of wives work other than a regular day shift. Variations in shift work status by sex of spouse are examined according to job, race, and life-cycle characteristics. A multivariate analysis indicates that a different composite offactors affects the shift work status of husbands and wives. Given the wide variation in the prevalence of non-day employment within major groups and the sex segregation of the labor force, we look at detailed occupations and industries to the extent possible.     

Divorce,living arrangements,and material well-being during the transition to adulthood in rural Malawi

In this paper, we use longitudinal data to investigate how parental death and divorce influence young women’s own experience of divorce in Malawi, a setting where women marry relatively early and unions are fragile. We find that maternal death and parental divorce are positively associated with divorce for young women but, after controlling for socio-demographic and marital characteristics, only the association with maternal death remains statistically significant. Maternal and paternal death are both strongly associated with women’s post-divorce living arrangements, which in turn affects their material well-being. This finding suggests that divorcing at a young age shapes the subsequent life chances of women; although some women return to their parental home and may have the opportunity to reset the transition to adulthood, other women begin their 20s as head of their own household and with considerable material disadvantage.     

Social class and socio-economic differentials in divorce in England and Wales

Summary The characteristics of a national sample of over 2,000 couples who divorced in 1979 are analysed according to the social class and socio-economic position of the husband. The demographic variables investigated for social class and socio-economic differentials include ages at marriage and divorce, duration of marriage, previous marital status, family size and the presence of a pre-maritally conceived child. In addition, an age-standardized measure, the 'standardized divorce ratio' is used to summarise the relative rates of divorce for the different social classes and socio-economic groups. Using this measure, the rate of divorce for couples in Social Class I is only half that for the average couple, whereas for couples in Social Class V and couples in which the husband is unemployed it is more than double.