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Lost jobs, broken marriages

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Abstract

This paper examines the impact of both husbands’ and wives’ job displacement on the risk that the marriage ends in divorce. Using Swedish-linked employee–employer data, all married couples in which one of the spouses lost his or her job because of an establishment closure in 1987 or 1988 and a comparison sample were identified. Over a 12-year period, the excess risk of divorce among couples’ in which the husband was displaced was 13% and statistically significant. The estimated impact of wives’ job displacements was of almost the same size, but not statistically significant.

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Notes

  1. See von Wachter (2009) for a review of the literature.

  2. Attewell (1999) found that the effect of marital break-up on the risk of subsequent job loss were similar in size to the effect of job loss on subsequent divorce.

  3. The focus on workers displaced because of an establishment closure instead of on unemployment has some implications for the interpretation of the results. As Stephens (2002) recognises, displaced workers do not necessarily experience unemployment. Because of advance notices or otherwise foreseen displacements, they may have found new jobs without suffering through a period of unemployment. However, unemployed workers have not necessarily been displaced; they may have quit voluntarily (perhaps to return to school) or may have come to the end of seasonal employment. These types of unemployment may not require any adjustments within the family that could reduce marital stability.

  4. Similarly, Charles and Stephens (2004) did not find that spousal disability affected the divorce risk.

  5. Weiss and Willis (1997) and Böheim and Ermisch (2001) have studied the impact of unexpected financial changes on the risk of divorce.

  6. Prior research has used family stress theory and, more specifically, the ABC-X model as a framework for analysing the effects of unemployment on marital stability (e.g., Voydanoff 1983; Starkey 1996).

  7. Björklund and Eriksson (1998) reviewed the Nordic literature on the effect of unemployment on mental health.

  8. See Jones (1992) for a review of the literature on wives’ reactions to their husbands’ unemployment.

  9. Catalano et al. (1993) showed that unemployment is associated with alcohol abuse, and Kyriacou et al. (1999) showed that domestic violence is more prevalent among the unemployed.

  10. However, it should be noted that women were mainly working part time.

  11. For more details on Swedish divorce legislation, see Jänterä-Jareborg (2003).

  12. Income taxation and the administration of the universal Swedish welfare state provide the source for many of the variables in these registers. The employer files all wage payments to the tax authorities. Because nearly all transfers in the Swedish welfare state, such as sickness and unemployment benefits, are subject to taxation, the National Social Insurance Board also files income statements on these transfers (along with non-taxable social assistance payments).

  13. This procedure has previously been applied in Eliason and Storrie (2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) and Eliason (2011).

  14. The taxation of wealth was abolished in Sweden on January 1, 2007.

  15. In principle, this information would only be missing if either of the spouses were living abroad in that particular year.

  16. Because joint parenthood cannot be established in the data, the measure used in the analysis represents the minimum number of children reported for either of the spouses.

  17. Inpatient stays for giving birth were excluded if there were no medical complications.

  18. Although it is not as likely in secularised countries, a high marriage ratio could also indicate a social norm that favours marriage, which implies higher social costs associated with divorce.

  19. See also Table 4.

  20. Rosenbaum and Rubin (1985) judged a SDM of 20 to be substantial, whereas Normand et al. (2001) considered an SDM less than 10 to be small.

  21. The fixed effect estimator, which includes both the lagged and leading indicators of incidence of job loss, has become standard in the displaced worker literature when examining wage and earnings effects (see Jacobson et al. 1993; Margolis 1999; von Wachter et al. 2009; Schmieder et al. 2010; Couch and Placzek 2010).

  22. The presented relative effects are calculated as \(\delta^k/\left( {E[y_{D=1}^k ]-\delta^k} \right)\).

  23. In an international context these losses are rather limited, although they are in line with the findings of previous Nordic research (e.g., Eliason and Storrie 2006; Eliason 2011; Huttunen et al. 2011).

  24. The different estimates generated by using the two time windows suggest that, in lengthier closing processes, those leaving early have a lower divorce risk (which is line with the hypothesis that some workers with better outside options leave the closing workplace early for new jobs) or that the longer window primarily picks up normal turnover that is unrelated to the closure.

  25. When the outcome event is rare and the exposure is more common, propensity score methods are particularly useful as the number of covariates that can be conditioned on increases (Cepeda et al. 2003; Braitman and Rosenbaum 2002).

  26. However, the few couples in which the wife’s earnings constituted more than 60% of total earnings did not allow the impact of job displacement to be estimated with any precision for this subgroup.

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Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex, and at the Labour and Public Economics Workshop, Göteborg University. Helpful comments given by John Ermisch, Dan Hamermesh, Henry Ohlsson, Donald Storrie, Rick Wicks, Christian Dustmann, and the three anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. Part of this paper was written while I enjoyed ISER’s hospitality on a grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research.

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  1. The Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU), P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20, Uppsala, Sweden

    Marcus Eliason

  2. Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Marcus Eliason

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Correspondence to Marcus Eliason.

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Eliason, M. Lost jobs, broken marriages. J Popul Econ 25, 1365–1397 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-011-0394-4

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