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Military service and marital dissolution: a trajectory analysis

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Abstract

Military service adds additional challenges for married couples. Previous literature on service and marital stability is comprised of mixed results and has often ignored the timing of these effects. This timing is important as it helps disclose the nature of causality and has implications for both military and social security policies. Using a trajectory specification, I estimate the effect of military service on the likelihood of divorce during the volunteer’s period of service and the years following. Two veteran cohorts are examined, those who served during the early twenty-first century wars and those who served during the early 1980s. Among my results, the former cohort is shown to have had their divorce probability increased in the first 2 years post-service, while the opposite effect is found for the latter cohort. Unlike many previous studies of military service and marital stability, I find that effects are not overly dissimilar across racial groups.

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Notes

  1. Military personnel (divorce rate) data come from the Correlates of War Project (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

  2. The military provides several benefits that are more valuable to volunteers with dependents. For example, military personnel who have dependents receive housing allowances that are approximately 25 % greater than personnel with no dependents (Hogan and Seifert 2010).

  3. Strong Bonds, the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), the Chaplain’s Religious Enrichment Development Operations (CREDO), and MarriageCare are the names of the U.S. Army’s, Marines’, Navy’s, and Air Force’s marital aid programs, respectively.

  4. The eras are generally named for the major war that took place in that time period while the All-Volunteer Force era refers to the post-draft period. Specifically, the World War II (WWII) service era refers to pre-July 1950; Korean War era July 1950–July 1964; Vietnam War era August 1964–April 1975; and the All-Volunteer Force era post-April 1975.

  5. Gimbel and Booth (1994) find that Vietnam veterans who saw combat were more likely to have antisocial behaviors which, in turn, decreased their marital stability. Ruger et al. (2002) find that self-reported participation in combat increases the hazard rate for marital dissolution by over 60 percent.

  6. It is worth restating that these CPS models do not address unobservables. It may be the case that (especially during the AVF period) unobservables related to enlistment are correlated with unobservables related to the probability of divorce, a point made later on in this article. Estimates here may not be truly interpreted as causal, but serve as a starting point.

  7. Trajectory specifications have been widely used in empirical studies. For example, they have recently been used to estimate the effects of motherhood on earnings by Fernández-Kranz et al. (2013).

  8. Models without individual fixed effects were also estimated. For brevity, these results are not presented here but are available from the author. However, I note that these results are highly similar to those presented here in terms of sign and significance, but much larger in magnitude - implying that controlling for unobservables is important in this case.

  9. That is to say, it is uncommon for an individual to experience two legal divorces in back to back years, for example.

  10. More specific minority veteran sample sizes (e.g., Hispanic veterans or African-American veterans) were deemed too small to analyze individually, especially with regard to the NLSY97 sample, which constitutes my primary data sample.

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  1. School of Business, Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville, GA, 30043, USA

    P. Wesley Routon

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Routon, P.W. Military service and marital dissolution: a trajectory analysis. Rev Econ Household 15, 335–355 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-016-9323-3

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