Continued Pursuit of Happily Ever After: Low Barriers to Divorce and Happiness

被引：3
作者：
Horner E.M. [1 ,2 ]
机构：
[1] Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
[2] Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
来源：
Journal of Family and Economic Issues | 2014年 / 35卷 / 2期
关键词：
Economic demography; Happiness; Quasi-experimental design; Unilateral divorce;
D O I：
10.1007/s10834-013-9366-z
中图分类号：
学科分类号：
摘要：
Throughout the 1970s, a "no-fault revolution" swept through the United States, reducing the legal and economic barriers to divorce. Previous studies have found that these legal changes did at least temporarily increase divorces, and may have been, on average, detrimental to women's economic well-being. It has also been suggested that reducing the barriers to divorce redistributed power to spouses with better predicted outcomes on the remarriage market. In keeping with this theory, the current study examined men and women ages 25-50 as they transitioned to low-barriers to divorce regimes. My data show that reductions in the barriers to divorce were associated with reductions in women's happiness, particularly among older women and women with children. Conversely, older men and men with children (these women's potential partners) reported on average higher happiness after low barriers to divorce. These relationships were found even for individuals who remained married, suggesting that this redistribution of happiness was in part the result of a change in bargaining power within marriages. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
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收藏
页码：228 / 240
页数：12
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