All's fair in love and war
Family Law and Social Change: Judicial Views of Joint Custody, 1998–2011
Julie Artis & Andrew Krebs
Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in-depth interviews with judges in twenty-five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody — a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.
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United but (un)equal: Human capital, probability of divorce, and the marriage contract
Helmuth Cremer, Pierre Pestieau & Kerstin Roeder
Journal of Population Economics, January 2015, Pages 195-217
Abstract:
This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization is optimal with no divorce risk. Couples can self-insure through savings which offers some protection to the uneducated spouse, but at the expense of a distortion. Alternatively, for large divorce probabilities, symmetry in education, where both spouses receive an equal amount of education, may be optimal. This eliminates the risk associated with the lack of education, but reduces the efficiency of education choices. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a “second-best” solution as insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.
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Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession
Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett & Sara McLanahan
Princeton Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
In the United States, the Great Recession has been marked by severe negative shocks to labor market conditions. In this study, we combine longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with Bureau of Labor Statistics data on local area unemployment rates to examine the relationship between adverse labor market conditions and intimate partner violence between 1999 and 2010. We find that rapidly worsening labor market conditions are associated with increases in the prevalence of violent/controlling behavior in marriage. These effects are most pronounced among whites and those with at least some post-secondary education. Worsening economic conditions significantly increase the risk that white mothers and more educated mothers will be in violent/controlling marriages rather than high quality marital unions.
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Suicide and Property Rights in India
Siwan Anderson & Garance Genicot
Journal of Development Economics, May 2015, Pages 64–78
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women’s property rights, we show that better property rights for women are associated with a decrease in the difference between female and male suicide rates, but an increase in both male and female suicides. We conjecture that increasing female property rights increased conflict within household and this increased conflict resulted in more suicides among both men and women in India. Using individual level data on domestic violence we find evidence that increased property rights for women did increase the incidence of wife beating in India. A model of intra-household bargaining with asymmetric information and costly conflict is consistent with these findings.
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Christoph Wunder & Johannes Schwarze
Journal of Happiness Studies, December 2014, Pages 1239-1257
Abstract:
Posner (Aging and old age, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995) proposes the redistribution of health spending from old women to old men to equalize life expectancy. His argument is based on the assumption that the woman’s utility is higher if her husband is alive. Using self-reported satisfaction measures from a long-running German panel survey, the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the present study conducts an empirical test of this assumption and investigates the question of whether and to what extent widowed women’s utility responds to her spouse’s death. We apply a combination of propensity score matching and parametric regression techniques. Our results reveal satisfaction trajectories of women who experience the death of their spouse and identifies the causal effect of widowhood. The average level of satisfaction in a control group of non-widowed women serves as a reference to measure the degree of adaptation to widowhood. The results suggest bereavement has no enduring effect on satisfaction, and that is evidence against Posner’s assumption. We conclude that elderly women would not benefit from Posners policy proposal.
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Lindsey Aloia & Denise Solomon
Human Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study drew upon the physiological model of stress and desensitization processes to deduce hypotheses linking the intensity of conflict communication and exposure to familial verbal aggression in childhood to experiences of conflict within romantic relationships. One hundred college-aged students (50 dating couples) participated in a dyadic interaction in which partners discussed a source of conflict in their romantic relationship. Participants reported childhood exposure to familial verbal aggression, third-party observers rated the intensity of conflict communication, and salivary cortisol indexed physiological stress responses to the conflict interactions. As predicted, results showed a positive association between conflict intensity and cortisol reactivity, and this association was attenuated for individuals who reported higher, rather than lower, levels of childhood exposure to familial verbal aggression.
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Strategic non-marital cohabitation: Theory and empirical implications
Amy Farmer & Andrew Horowitz
Journal of Population Economics, January 2015, Pages 219-237
Abstract:
Non-marital cohabitation is a rapidly growing global phenomenon. Prior literature examines the puzzling empirical regularity that premarital cohabitation is associated with higher divorce rates. Since cohabitation should yield improved match-quality information, one might expect the opposite. This result, and its recent weakening, have been explored empirically and produced theoretically using matching models. In this paper, we develop an intra-household bargaining model of alternative dating and cohabitation paths to marriage in which higher relationship exit costs for cohabitors relative to daters generates the observed higher divorce rate. We also show that asymmetric exit costs can produce rejection and generate exits that would not otherwise occur. In addition, we show that even when cohabitors have lower average marriage quality, expected utility for a given match quality is higher, and some utility enhancing marriages that would not have taken place without cohabitation will occur in its presence.
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Familism: A cultural value with implications for romantic relationship quality in U.S. Latinos
Belinda Campos, Oscar Fernando Rojas Perez & Christine Guardino
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
Familism is a cultural value that emphasizes interdependent family relationships that are warm, close, and supportive. We theorized that familism values can be beneficial for romantic relationships and tested whether (a) familism would be positively associated with romantic relationship quality and (b) this association would be mediated by less attachment avoidance. Evidence indicates that familism is particularly relevant for U.S. Latinos but is also relevant for non-Latinos. Thus, we expected to observe the hypothesized pattern in Latinos and explored whether the pattern extended to non-Latinos of European and East Asian cultural background. A sample of U.S. participants of Latino (n = 140), European (n = 176), and East Asian (n = 199) cultural background currently in a romantic relationship completed measures of familism, attachment, and two indices of romantic relationship quality, namely, partner support and partner closeness. As predicted, higher familism was associated with higher partner support and partner closeness, and these associations were mediated by lower attachment avoidance in the Latino sample. This pattern was not observed in the European or East Asian background samples. The implications of familism for relationships and psychological processes relevant to relationships in Latinos and non-Latinos are discussed.
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Sex Imbalance, Marital Matching and Intra-household Bargaining: Evidence from China
Julan Du, Yongqin Wang & Yan Zhang
China Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the effects of sex imbalance on matching patterns in China’s marriage markets. We hypothesize that the economic inequality caused by economic liberalization, together with sex imbalance, will lead to women’s hypergamy (marrying up). Employing CGSS data, our empirical findings support the hypothesis. We also establish that sex imbalance enhances the postnuptial bargaining power of the wife vis-à-vis the husband in intra-household resource allocation. The findings are robust to IV estimation and robustness checks.
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The Dynamics of Marriage and Divorce
Gustaf Bruze, Michael Svarer & Yoram Weiss
Journal of Labor Economics, January 2015, Pages 123-170
Abstract:
We formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage, divorce, and remarriage using panel data on two cohorts of Danish men and women. The marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter marriage. We find that the educations of husbands and wives are complements. Education raises the share of the marital surplus for men but not for women. As men and women get older, husbands receive a larger share of the marital surplus. The estimated costs of divorce are high both early and late in marriage.
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Lisa Dillon et al.
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, December 2014, Pages 97-108
Abstract:
In this post hoc analysis of mate retention behavior, over 3000 married couples from five cultures completed the Marriage and Relationship Questionnaire (MARQ). The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) was used to test relationships for selected variables. For all countries and both sexes, the spouse being attracted to other people was linked to worry about spousal infidelity. For all cases except the Russians, being attracted to one’s spouse was related to less worry by the spouse about infidelity. In all cases, one’s being attractive was associated with spousal feelings of possessiveness. Having a spouse who went out without them was related to infidelity worries for wives in all groups and husbands in three groups. Feelings of possessiveness were related to wanting to touch the spouse in most groups, and husbands reported more such desire in all groups. Husbands who sought sex outside of marriage worried about reciprocal spousal infidelity in all cultures, as did wives in most cultures. Overall, the data suggest that attractiveness and attraction shape mate retention emotions and behavior in similar ways across cultures.
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Catherine Tinsley, Taeya Howell & Emily Amanatullah
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, January 2015, Pages 37–48
Abstract:
Despite the rise of dual-income households in the United States and a narrowing of the nation’s gender wage gap, we find that many men and women still prefer the husband to be the primary breadwinner. To help explain intra-marital wage preferences, we argue for a new construct, gender determinism, which captures the extent to which a person believes gender categories dictate individual characteristics. We show that deterministic views of gender increase both intra-marital wage gap preferences and work choices that may perpetuate the gender wage gap. Our results hold in both student and non-student samples, suggesting some endurance of these beliefs. We discuss how our findings contribute to extant research on implicit person theory and gender role theory, and the implications of our findings for gender wage equity.