Divorce: What Does Learning Have to Do with It? / Ioana Marinescu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marinescu, Ioana.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21761.

NBER working paper series no. w21761

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Divorce

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

Learning about marriage quality has been proposed as a key mechanism for explaining how the probability of divorce evolves with marriage duration, and why people often cohabit before getting married. I develop four theoretical models of divorce, three of which include learning. I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to test reduced form implications of these models. The data is inconsistent with models including a substantial amount of learning. On the other hand, the data is consistent with a model without any learning, but where marriage quality changes over time.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2015.