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The Relationship Between Internet Access and Divorce Rate

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Abstract

The rise of the internet has affected the market for romantic partners, arguably lowering search costs. It has been claimed anecdotally that this has led to an increase in divorce. However, a more careful examination of theory suggests that, even if search costs have declined with the rise of the internet, this would not necessarily increase divorce propensity. To examine the issue empirically, this paper employs both state- and household-level data on family structure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey. A comparison of high and low internet penetration states, as well as a micro panel of initially married households with and without internet access, reveals no evidence that the rise of the internet has increased divorce.

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Notes

  1. See also Hitsch et al. (2010), who examine data from a large dating site. All three studies focus on the U.S.; but see Johnson-Hanks (2008), who presents evidence that internet communication has had an effect on marriage markets in developing countries, as well.

  2. This of course does not mean that, among groups who have such strong tastes, those who do marry outside their own race or religion will not have higher levels of marital instability (Jones 2010).

  3. Many internet matching sites require paid subscriptions, as well, though they are generally not very expensive. A subscription to Match.com costs $12.99/month, while Craigslist postings are free, and unlimited messaging on AshleyMadison.com costs $60/month.

  4. Romantic partners may be thought of as “experience goods,” in which the value of the match is not fully apparent until after substantial resources have been allocated (see Bei et al. 2004, for a discussion of the value of internet information searches for experience goods).

  5. Alternatively, if one spouse is less satisfied with the marriage than the other, a fall in search costs may simply lead to a greater concentration of within-household bargaining power with the less satisfied spouse. To the extent that such bargaining is costless, this would reduce the importance of this effect of the internet on divorce. See Chiappori and Weiss (2006) for a bargaining model of marriage and divorce.

  6. Avoiding harm to one’s spouse is an important factor in extramarital decision-making (Meyering and Epling-McWherter 1985).

  7. Each divorce creates two newly-single individuals, increasing (marginally) the number of available partners for other still-marrieds. Moreover, each divorce also likely reduces the social stigma associated with divorce, raising the likelihood of divorce among other marriages.

  8. In two of these years, questions were asked about internet usage at work. However, there is not enough data to perform any substantive analysis; moreover, access to chat rooms and other socially-oriented websites at work is generally restricted by employers.

  9. An alternative Prais-Winsten specification of the error structure, which allows for within-state and temporal correlation across states, with an AR(1) process for within-state correlation delivers essentially identical results as those presented in the following section.

  10. In order to facilitate cleaner matches across subsequent surveys, I also dropped households in which marital status was imputed, or which included more or less than two married persons, or two married persons and some number of divorced or separated persons. The number of such households is quite small, however.

  11. If the household was in its first month in sample when the internet supplement survey was taken, this would then be 16 months later; if the household was in its second month in sample initially, then the matched survey would be 15 months later; and so forth. I controlled in the analysis below for initial month in sample.

  12. The results are robust to non-clustered standard errors, or standard errors clustered only at the state level.

  13. In an alternate specifications, I also considered controlling for the husband’s and wife’s industry and job function (see Young and Wallace 2009 for indications that different types of employment are relevant); the results of that exercise were similar to those presented here.

  14. Shares for married couple wives are very similar.

  15. Moreover, one must take care to distinguish the possibility that intensive use of the internet is associated with variables unobserved in the data, such as running a home-based business (Fitzgerald and Winter 2001).

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    Todd D. Kendall

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Kendall, T.D. The Relationship Between Internet Access and Divorce Rate. J Fam Econ Iss 32, 449–460 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-010-9222-3

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