Abstract
Currently, the divorce literature has mainly focused on the introduction of no-fault and unilateral divorce grounds to explain the positive relation between ‘making divorce easier’ and divorce rates. We use the case study of Belgium to demonstrate that both no-fault and unilateral might not be the ideal proxies for ‘making divorce easier’, because the procedural level of legislation is entirely disregarded. Therefore, we propose an alternative proxy which does manage to capture the time-varying legislative environment, namely the duration of the legal divorce process. We find that a reduction in the duration of the divorce process by a month increases the divorce trend with about 1.4 %.
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Notes
A nice overview of the no-fault debate can be found in Mechoulan (2005).
For an extensive overview, see Verschelden (2010).
A minor legal reform did take place in July 1962. This change, however, only dealt with very specific cases and is therefore of no importance to this paper.
See De Busschere (1990) for a detailed overview.
All data used were gathered from EUROSTAT, unless explicitly mentioned otherwise.
Purchasing power parity converted GDP per capita at current prices for Belgium was obtained from Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0, Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania, May 2011.
Estimations using DOLS to control for serial correlation in the cointegrating vectors yielded similar results and are available on request.
As mentioned supra, in the US literature the matter of classification of States was one of the main issues in the Peters-Allen-Friedberg discussion.
Ideally, one would like to include more detailed information on the introduction of computerization or other measures that increase the efficiency of courts to isolate the influence of these measures on the duration of the divorce process more adequately. Also, increased computerization may allow for do-it-yourself divorces, which could substantially reduce the (time) cost of divorce. Unfortunately, these micro-data are rarely available since courts are very reluctant to provide information regarding their internal efficiency.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Ben Depoorter, Gerrit De Geest, Gerdie Everaert, Mark Hoekstra, Koen Schoors, Dirk Van de gaer, Joost Vandenbossche, Marijn Verschelde, Gerd Verschelden, the participants of the Seminar Series at Ghent University and the 10th European Divorce Research Conference in Helsinki and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Financial support of the FWO and the Hercules Foundation (AUGE/11/13) is gratefully acknowledged.
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Appendix: Dickey–Fuller simulated critical values applicable to the sample
Appendix: Dickey–Fuller simulated critical values applicable to the sample
See Table 6.
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Bracke, S., Mulier, K. Making divorce easier: the role of no-fault and unilateral revisited. Eur J Law Econ 43, 239–254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-015-9485-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-015-9485-0