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Divorce and health in middle and older ages

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Abstract

The prevalence and incidence of divorce at older ages have doubled since 1990. We use Health and Retirement Study data to describe associations between divorce, remarriage and health in middle and later life, following individuals and couples through divorce and remarriage in models with individual or couple fixed effects. At middle and older ages, divorce is more often associated with adverse physical and mental health changes for women than for men. Remarriage is associated with a restoration of health and depression to pre-divorce levels for men and women. However, men are more likely to remarry. Evidence from couple models suggests that for husbands, but not wives, remarriage may be associated with less depression than the baseline marriage. Differences in self-reported health associated with divorce appear linked to (diagnosed) mental health conditions among wives and physical health conditions among husbands.

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Notes

  1. Studies that do focus on older populations are e.g., Zhang and Hayward (2006), Hughes and Waite (2009), Dupre et al. (2009), Reczek et al. (2016)

  2. The HRS (Health and Retirement Study 2011) is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (grant number NIA U01AG009740) and is conducted by the University of Michigan.

  3. Although market production plays a smaller role in later life, even in later life economies of scale and specialization in specific home production tasks can provide health investment advantages to married couples.

  4. Consistent with the “economic stress” hypothesis, data collected in the first wave of the HRS reveal that 52% of divorced women worry ‘a lot’ about their retirement income, compared to 31% of married women, 32% of divorced men and 25% of married men (authors’ calculations, available upon request).

  5. Hughes and Waite (2009) did not find gender differences.

  6. Brown and Wright (2017) find that about 4.6% of previously married individuals over age 50 cohabit. We included those partnered/cohabiting as “married”. Our conclusions are not sensitive to dropping them from the sample. Results are available upon request.

  7. These attrition rates are in line with the other studies of the HRS (e.g., Reczek et al. 2016; Dupre et al. 2009).

  8. The remarried include respondents who either changed marital status from divorced or separated to partnered or married, or who changed partners.

  9. This corresponds to clinical depression indicated by a score of 16 or more on the full scale (Steffick 2000). The Online Appendix provides additional information on imputation of missing information and other details of measure construction. Models also included a dummy variable to indicate the use of imputed depression data.

  10. The HRS collects income information of the household head and spouse only.

  11. While it is possible to model a baseline marriage as remarriage if it is not the respondent’s first marriage, we were primarily interested in the health-changes associated with changes in marital status in later life.

  12. Health behaviors were considered as either marital-health selection factors or mechanisms. Alternative models additionally included controls for BMI (based on self-reported height and weight) smoking currently, household income, more than three alcoholic beverages per day, and a dummy variable for lacking health insurance, relevant for those younger than 65 years of age. Although inclusion of these controls reduced the size of the significant divorce associations by 0–1.4 percentage points, statistical significance was unchanged for 6 out of the 8 significant divorce and remarriage associations reported in Table 2 (and Online Appendix Table A1). Evidence for an important mediating role of health behaviors was absent for men and mixed for women. See Online Appendix Table A11 for results.

  13. Models also control for widowhood, fully interacted with gender. Controls for race, ethnicity, and Census region were included to account for the HRS oversamples of blacks and Hispanics and Florida residents (Winship and Radbill 1994; Solon, Haider, and Wooldridge 2015).

  14. Results from logistic regression models are reported in Online Appendix Table A5. Inference was not affected by the choice of model. Specifically, the coefficients of the variables of interest in Logit models (Online Appendix Table A5) have the same sign and significance levels as LP models (Table 2, and Online Appendix Table A1).

  15. It is possible that remarriage/repartnering is selected on health status. We tested the sensitivity of the results, by treating divorce as an absorbing state (until death or loss to follow up). In those models, we focus on the couple’s divorce, essentially constraining husbands and wives to have the same marital status following divorce. Online Appendix Table A2 shows the results from these models.

  16. Note that Couple_Divorcedjt remains 1 after the couple has divorced. Remarriedijt indicates a marriage after the couple divorces. Therefore, Couple_Divorcedjt, is always 1 if Remarriedijt is 1, and a triple interaction does not technically change the specification, but is added for expositional clarity.

  17. Summary statistics for the widowed in the individual sample are not shown, but available upon request.

  18. Summary statistics for couples are shown for the husbands and wives in their married, divorced, and remarried states. While all divorce, not all remarry, thus differences in means for time-constant variables result from an unbalanced panel.

  19. For most of our analyses, we no longer include a couple in our sample after the death of one spouse.

  20. In (OLS) models without individual fixed effects, divorce is associated with worse health and more depression for both men and women, and remarriage is associated with worse health and depression for women (relative to baseline marriage), but only with depression for men. Most of the gender-differences are not statistically significant. All point estimates tend to be larger in absolute size compared to models that control for individual fixed effects. While OLS coefficients are larger, the fixed-effects results still show an effect of divorce for women, suggesting that our main conclusion is not driven by health selection into divorce. This is in line with Lin et al. (2018) who find little evidence of health selection into divorce in a similar sample. See Online Appendix Table A9 for results.

  21. For women, the regression-adjusted difference in “bad” health between women in the divorced and married states is the coefficient of the divorce variable. For men, it is the sum of the coefficient of divorce, and the coefficient of the divorce-male interaction term.

  22. For women, the regression-adjusted difference between the married and remarried states is the coefficient of the remarriage variable. For men, it is the sum of the coefficient of the remarriage variable and the coefficient of the remarriage-male interaction term.

  23. We also estimated alternative models that additionally included controls for BMI (based on self-reported height and weight) smoking currently, household income, more than three alcoholic beverages per day, and a dummy variable for lacking health insurance, relevant for those younger than 65 years of age. Although inclusion of these controls reduced the size of the significant divorce associations by 0–1.4 percentage points, statistical significance was unchanged for 6 out of the 8 significant divorce and remarriage associations reported in Table 2 (and Online Appendix Table A1). Evidence for an important mediating role of health behaviors is absent for men and mixed for women. See Online Appendix Table A11 for results.

  24. For wives, the regression-adjusted difference in “bad” health between the married and divorced states is the coefficient of the “couple divorced” variable. For husbands, it is the sum of the coefficient of the “couple divorced” variable and the coefficient of the “couple divorced”-husband interaction term.

  25. For wives, the regression-adjusted difference in health between the remarried and married state, is the sum of the coefficient of the “couple divorced” variable and the coefficient of the remarriage variable. For husbands, it is the sum of four coefficients: the coefficient of the “couple divorced” variable, the coefficient of the “couple divorced” and husband interaction, the coefficient of the remarriage variable, and the coefficient of the triple interaction between “couple divorced”, remarriage and husband.

  26. In (OLS) models without couple fixed effects, divorce was associated with worse health for wives, but not husbands, while remarriage was associated with less depression for husbands. None of the gender-differences were statistically significant. All point estimates tended to be larger in absolute size compared to the models that control for couple fixed effects. See Online Appendix Table A9 for results.

  27. For example, adding income controls reduced the association between divorce and health by 0.2 percentage points, or 5% (0.2/4.1) of the association between divorce and health in column (1). Adding mental health controls reduced the association between divorce and health by another 1.1 percentage point, or 27% (1.1/4.1) of the association between divorce and health in column (1).

  28. The change from .043 to .023, is a 2 percentage point reduction, or 37% of .054, the coefficient in column (1).

  29. The schematic without remarriage uses the coefficients of Husband, Couple Divorced, Couple Divorced-Husband, Time, Time-Husband, Time-Couple Divorced, and Time-Couple Divorced-Husband.

  30. The schematic with remarriage additionally uses the coefficients Couple Divorced-Remarried, Couple Divorced-Remarried-Husband, Time-Couple Divorced-Remarried, and Time-Couple Divorced-Remarried-Husband.

  31. Specifically, the coefficients of the variables of interest in Logit models (Online Appendix Table A5) have the same sign and significance levels as LP models (Table 2, and Online Appendix Table A1). The coefficients of the key variables in models of the complete 5-category Likert Scale (Column (1) and (3) Online Appendix Table A6) have the same sign and significance levels as in LP models of “bad” health (Table 2, and Online Appendix Table A1). The coefficients on the key variables in models of the 8-item CESD scale (Column (2) and (4) Online Appendix Table A6) have the same sign and significance levels as the LP models of depression (Table 2, and Online Appendix Table A1).

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Acknowledgements

The HRS (Health and Retirement Study) is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (grant number NIA U01AG009740) and is conducted by the University of Michigan. We use the RAND HRS Data, Version M. Produced by the RAND Center for the Study of Aging, with funding from the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration. Santa Monica, CA (September 2013)). The views expressed in this paper are the views of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. We thank Jennifer Kohn for discussion and comments, as well as participants in the doctoral student workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center and the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR) seminar. This work as initiated when Zulkarnain was a CIDR Demography Fellow.

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  1. Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, USA

    Alice Zulkarnain

  2. Marxe School of Public & International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY, New York, NY, 10010-5585, USA

    Sanders Korenman

  3. CUNY Institute for Demographic Research, One Bernard Baruch Way, Box D-901, New York, NY, 10010-5585, USA

    Sanders Korenman

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  1. Alice Zulkarnain
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Zulkarnain, A., Korenman, S. Divorce and health in middle and older ages. Rev Econ Household 17, 1081–1106 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-018-9435-z

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