Union dissolution and remarriage

Divorce has rapidly increased since the 1970s in Japan. Existing research suggests that the expansion of socio-economic disparities with deteriorating macro-economic performance is a major cause of the rising divorce rate. However, not only socio-economic factors but also family background characteristics may play an important role, particularly in a ‘strong family’ country such as Japan. This paper investigates the effects of intergenerational family ties on the risk of divorce, using retrospective life history data from a nationally representative survey in Japan. In the past decade, much has been written and discussed about the associations between strong family ties and low fertility, however, little attention has been paid to the relationships between strong family ties and divorce. The results of discrete-time logistic regression models suggest that patrilocal co-residence and residential proximity as well as the presence of young children substantially reduce the risk of divorce. The fact that intergenerational co-residence can stabilize marriage denotes that weakening intergenerational ties or ‘weak family’ may entail a higher risk of marital dissolution, given the long-term decline in macro-economic performance. The results would provide valuable insights into the links between strong family and demographic behavior.

Throughout their life, women go through different stages where their autonomy is challenged. Some develop strategies to free themselves from a controlling family member and eventually, if married, from their partner. Thus, navigating through different unions may bring some women to gain more confidence in themselves and in return to have greater control of their own life. However, the relationship between the marital paths and women's perceived autonomy remains unclear. Our main goal is to evaluate the extent to which the various marital trajectories used by women in sub-Saharan Africa affect their perception of autonomy using the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project. To achieve our goal, we use sequential analysis to illustrate women's marital paths. Subsequently, we use similarly grouped marital trajectories as our main independent variable. Autonomy, our dependent variable, is represented by a series of questions on different dimensions commonly used in the literature. We use ordered logistic regression models to predict autonomy and control for covariates shown to have some effects on women's empowerment. We expect that ever-divorced women will be more likely to have higher autonomy particularly for the dimensions of divorce, decision-making and negotiation of safer sex.

Present paper is an attempt to understand age pattern of divorced/separated population. Paper also calculated marriage dissolution rates for divorced/separated population, over the past three decades (1971-2001) in India by using census data.
Since last three decades’ continuous increase in numbers of divorced and separated persons have been observed. The increase is faster among the female population. It shows that there is high prevalence of remarriages among the males population as compared to the females. Age specific annual dissolution rates per thousand populations have been calculated. Results reveal that among both the sexes the persons who have experienced marriage dissolution are mostly concentrated in the middle ages, i.e. 15-44 ages. For both the sexes peak of dissolution curve is found in between 20-24 ages, except 1971-81. Among the male and females the highest proportion of marriage dissolution persons found during the 20-24 ages. After attaining the surge in dissolution curve by both the sexes, it shows a declines trend. Dissolution curve of females sharply decline as compared to males. Further analysis will be carried out on the basis of these preliminary findings.

Also in Belgium, higher-order unions are playing an increasingly important part in family life. How social, economical and cultural characteristics are associated with the timing and risk to remarry or recohabit educationally homogamous/heterogamous is however not very well known. Yet, research about educational assortative mating patterns can give us insights into factors of attractiveness on the remarriage market and is relevant for understanding and predicting the reproduction of social inequality. Through analyzing data from 3050 repartnered men and women, we examine if higher order unions are more or less strongly homogamous than first marriages and how the patterns observed among first marriages influence the patterns observed in higher-order unions. First descriptive results show only small differences in educational assortative mating patterns before and after divorce. Competing risks models suggest that there is a kind of continuity over the subsequent unions that divorcing people are forming in their life courses.

In addition to the demographic components: fertility, mortality and migration, the formation or the dissolution of households are influenced by the marital/union transition and consequently it influences the household composition. Based on the population censuses of 1991 and 2000, we calculated the occurrence/exposure (o/e) rates of marriage/union formation and dissolution for an important city of Brazil. These rates were compared with the respective rates estimated by Zeng, Yang, Wang, and Morgan for the United States of American at the same period. The age-specific rates of Brazil are similar to the rates of United States of American but the American people marry earlier than the Brazilian people. In Brazil, the marital transition rate from the status never-married to the status married has the highest value for the age of 30 while in the United States the highest values refer to the age of 24 for men and the age 22 for women. In Brazil the marital transition rate from the status widowed to the status married has the highest value for the age of 20 while in the United States the highest values refer to the age of 27 for men and the age 22 for women.

Present paper is an attempt to understand levels, trends and differentials of marriage dissolution during past three decades (1971-2001) in India by using census data. This paper also examines the remarriage cases among the persons who have experienced divorce/separation. Whether the cases of marriage dissolution are same for both the sexes or higher or lower among the particular sex throughout over decades? What is the dissimilarity in their age pattern? Is the sex ratio balanced, among those who have experienced marriage dissolution in their lives?
Result reveals that over the last few decades gender disparity between the sexes has been widened among the divorced/separated population. Sex ratio of divorced persons which is the ‘ratio of females to males in a population’ is much higher than the sex ratio of married population. One of the surprising findings from the study is that, in some of the states sex ratio among the divorced/separated population is very high, which is more than 5,000 females per thousand males, especially in Kerala and Manipur. This imbalance indirectly shows that practice of remarriage is more common among the males as compared to females. Analysis reveals that the dissolution rates are higher among the southern and northeastern states as compared to the northern, western and central states.

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.

Individuals seeking to remarry often face a more restricted marriage market compared with those searching for marriage for the first time. Marriage market constraints after divorce mean that individuals must often “cast a wider net” that includes potential partners of different ages, education, racial backgrounds, or nativity status. In this paper, we identify marriages formed in the previous year from 2008 to 2010 microfiles of the American Community Surveys. We examine whether remarried couples are more likely to cross racial/ethnic or nativity boundaries to form intermarriage than first married couples. We formulate hypotheses based on status exchange theories. Our results reveal that remarried individuals are more likely to form white-minority marriages than first married couples. In addition, marriages involving at least one person who has been previously married (i.e., divorced) are more heterogeneous in marriage order, educational attainment, and age than those couples in which both spouses are in first marriages. These results suggest strong status exchange in intermarriage among the remarried.

Women, especially mothers, are less likely than men to form new partnerships after union dissolution. As women are often primary custodial parents, finding and building relationships with a new partner might be prevented by lack of time and energy because they are caring for co-residential children. Given increases in shared physical custody in many countries, however, this stylized fact might change as fathers increase their child rearing responsibilities. Using data from the British Millennium Cohort Study and discrete-time event history analyses, we examine the prevalence and predictors of maternal repartnering into marriage or cohabitation during the first 7 years of a child’s life. Preliminary results suggest that, contrary to much of the existing theory, higher levels of visitation by the non-resident father was linked to lower maternal repartnering rates in the following period. This finding was robust to all of the model specifications. We find little evidence linking either child support receipt or child characteristics to maternal repartnering, except for the child’s ethnicity. Our results therefore suggest that recent trends toward increased shared physical child custody in industrialized countries are likely to diminish the likelihood of mothers repartnering, at least during the first 7 years of a child’s life.

We investigate divorce during and after the socialist regimes in three Eastern European countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary), with a focus on the role of social status, testing Goode’s hypothesis that states a positive relation between social status and divorce in a society where there are high legal, social and economic barriers to divorce. As these barriers gradually fade, so does the mentioned positive relation and divorce becomes more common in lower classes. Our study sample consists of first time married women and we construct piecewise constant exponential event history models, where the baseline hazard is the time elapsed since entry into first marriage until divorce (marriage duration, in months). We use several covariates as proxies for social status: educational status (at marriage), father’s social status, residence during childhood, as well as other control variables. We have found positive social gradients of divorce risks for Romania and Bulgaria during socialist times, but none for Hungary. In the post-socialist period, the link between social status and divorce risk loses its significance in Romania, while in Bulgaria an opposite relation emerge. The social gradient of divorce becomes negative there: low educated women, born and raised in rural settlements show the highest divorce risks.