Unemployment, marriage and divorce

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce. We use data on Spain, since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country. We find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of marriage; however, the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed. Results show the existence of different patterns, depending on geography: divorce rates in coastal regions are pro-cyclical, while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter-cyclical way.

KEYWORDS:

• Divorce
• marriage
• divorce law
• unemployment
• business cycle
• geography

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J12

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by Fundación BBVA, but the views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the Fundación BBVA. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the XVIII Encuentro de Economía Aplicada (Alicante, 2015), at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Applied Econometrics (Thessaloniki, 2015), at the XI Jornadas de la Asociación Española de Economía Laboral (Barcelona, 2015), at the 55th Congress of the European Regional Science Association (Lisbon, 2015), at the 62nd Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International (Portland, 2015), at the XXXX Simposio de Análisis Económico (Girona, 2015), and at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Western Regional Science Association (Big Island, 2016), and all the comments made by participants are much appreciated. Suggestions and observations received from one anonymous referee have improved the version originally submitted. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Of course, there are more determinants of divorce; e. g. unilateral divorce reforms (Friedberg 1998; Wolfers 2006; González and Viitanen 2009; González-Val and Marcén 2012a), child custody and child support laws (González-Val and Marcén 2012b), the birth control pill (Marcén 2015), price stability (Nunley 2010) or culture (Furtado, Marcén, and Sevilla-Sanz 2013) among others.

² Ceuta and Melilla, located on the African coast, are excluded from the analysis.

³ There is no information on the Spanish divorce rate at the province level for the period 1981 to 1997.

⁴ As can be seen in the next Section, we take into account this change of the divorce law in the empirical analysis including time fixed effects.

⁵ The Labour Force Survey is collected using the same EUROSTAT methodology in all European countries.

⁶ Note that there was a methodological change in the Spanish Labour Force Survey in 2001, which generated an abrupt change in the series in that period. To address this change, we add year fixed effects to our regressions.

⁷ Yearly data on employment by industry by region is not available, but differences in productive structures across regions should be controlled by the region fixed-effects.

⁸ Only the opposite movement in house prices in inland and coastal regions can explain an opposite reaction of couples. However, this was not the case in Spain. Blanco, Martín, and Vázquez (2016) study regional house price convergence in Spain during the housing boom, identifying four different convergence clubs in house prices among Spanish regions.

⁹ The average marriage rate by region for the period from 1985 to 2013 is shown in Table 1. The unemployment rate is also calculated for the same period. Data come from the INE.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by Fundación BBVA, I Convocatoria de Ayudas a Investigadores, Innovadores y Creadores Culturales. The authors also acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (projects ECO2013-45969-P and ECO2016-75941-R), the DGA (ADETRE research group), and FEDER.