Living standards after divorce: does alimony offset gender income inequalities?

Marital separations and divorces have dramatically increased during the last decades. The way they affect the economic situation of both men and women in an asymmetric way has been analysed in the literature (Uunk, 2004). However two points remain unexplored. Most studies on living standards after divorce do not take well into account child and spousal support payments. Second, in the case of divorce, it is often difficult to recover individuals who move, and then to compare the economic situation of both partners following the separation. The French administrative income-tax dataset we use enables us to overcome these two difficulties. We select all the divorcees whose divorce occurred in 2009 (around 65,000 couples), and we matched them with the previous year and the year after in order to compute the living standard variation. We then analyse to what extent alimony (reported in the tax return) do play their role in balancing living standards between the two spouses after divorce, offsetting possible economic inequalities. This analysis would be a way to assess the efficiency of the child support scale recently introduced in France. We also investigate the income sharing between the two spouses before and after the divorce, using difference in differences methods and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition.