"The average man who became divorced or separated was actually better off one year later, although the improvements in his situation were less marked than those experienced by the average intact couple."
"The inclusion of those who have remarried in the calculation of the economic consequences of divorce improves substantially the average income/needs of women. By the fifth year following the divorce or separation the average divorced woman is better off than in the year before divorce. The average, of course, includes both those who did remarry (the majority of whom are better off) and those who did not remarry (the majority of whom are in a worse position)."
"A close look at the income flows in the years following a divorce or separation reveals marked differences in the distribution of effects. The economic consequences of divorce are especially adverse for women. In most cases, children remain with the mother, who usually has considerably lower potential labor market earnings than her former husband, partly because her responsibilities for the children are likely to reduce her labor supply and may have limited her past human capital investments. Alimony and child support are the principal mechanisms for transfers from the ex-husband to the ex-wife, but payments are rarely frequent or sizeable enough to make up for an appreciable amount of the labor income lost through the departure of the ex-husband. Human capital investments on the part of the mother have a modest effect on her economic situation in the years following the divorce. Most men who divorce or separate are immediately better off because they retain most of their labor incomes, typically do not pay large amounts of alimony and child support to their ex-wives, and no longer have to provide for the level of needs associated with their former families. Much more important than growth in the ex-wife's own labor income is the role of a new husband's labor income upon her remarriage. More than half of the white women remarry within five years following a divorce or separation; the comparable fraction for black women is less than half."
Duncan, Greg J., and Saul D. Hoffman. "A reconsideration of the economic consequences of marital dissolution." Demography 22.4 (1985): 485-497.
"Second, and more enduringly, there will be added ongoing costs associated with running a second household. Most of the literature suggests that this hardship falls disproportionately on mothers (Bartfeld, 2000; Bianchi, 1992; Bianchi, Subaiya, & Kahn, 1999; Burkhauser, Duncan, Hauser, & Bernsten, 1990, 1991; Corcoran, 1979; David & Flory, 1989; Duncan & Hoffman, 1985; Espenshade, 1979; Garfinkel, McLanahan, & Hanson, 1998; Hoffman & Duncan, 1985; Holden & Smock, 1991; Peterson, 1996; Sayer, 2006; Smock, Manning, & Gupta, 1999; Sorenson, 1992; Teachman & Paasch, 1994; Weiss, 1984)."
"In contrast, Braver et al. (2005 ; see also Braver, 1999; Braver & O’Connell, 1998) have contended that, if proper accounting is made, the post-divorce circumstances of fathers and mothers are largely equal in the short term , while in the long run, the majority of divorced mothers fare better than their ex-husbands. To understand the debate requires understanding the operational definition of “standard of living.” Most researchers focus on the income-to-needs ratio , in which the household’s annual income is divided by the Federal Poverty Threshold (FPT) for comparable households. Because child support is very frequently paid by one divorced parent and received by the other (and less frequently, alimony is also paid), both are virtually always subtracted from the payer’s annual income and added to the recipient’s before division by the FPT. But Braver and his colleagues (2005) argued that at least two crucial, yet obvious factors have been typically omitted when such calculations are made.
First, all such calculations are based on gross income, yet, only after tax income can be used to support families. It turns out that custodial parents are taxed far more advantageously than noncustodial parents. Through such tax devices as the Head of Household filing status, the Earned Income Credit, and the Child Tax Credit, the IRS in effect subsidizes the standard of living in the custodial but not noncustodial households. Second, most of the above researchers have assumed that, other than child support, 100% of the children’s expenses are borne by custodial parents, while noncustodial parents were assumed to pay nothing : no child meals, no child transportation costs, $0 to entertain the children, nothing to provide room for the children in their homes, and no share of medical insurance or medical expenses, etc. In other words, most analyses do not take into account any kind of visitation expenses, nor any direct payments by noncustodial parents for the children, although these are often appreciable (Fabricius & Braver, 2003). Braver and Stockburger (2004) and Rogers and Bieniewicz (2004) specify a set of reasonable and robust assumptions, concerning the cost of children relative to adults, and the proportion of child’s expenses that travel with the child, and economies of scale, that can be used to correct estimates for those expenses borne by noncustodial parents instead of the custodial parents. Using such assumptions, Braver and O’Connell (1998) and Braver (1999) found that the average standards of living shortly after divorce for mothers and fathers were equivalent.
And what of the longer term? Few researchers have studied anything beyond about 18 months after the divorce, but two very common events become significant as time progresses. First, the salaries of many custodial mothers increase: Duncan and Hoffman (1985) found that, by 5 years after divorce, women who remained single increased their standard of living by 34%. Men’s salaries do not increase similarly because most already earn close to their maximum capacity at the time of divorce. Second, most divorced parents remarry as time progresses. According to Bumpass, Sweet, and Castro-Martin (1990), about two-thirds of divorced mothers and about three-quarters of divorced fathers remarry. When they do, the economics change again. When mothers remarry, they gain more income than expenses, whereas fathers do the reverse (Fabricius, Braver, & Deneau, 2003). Thus, remarriage tends to make mothers’ standards of living higher than fathers’. If the parents’ standards of living were about equal shortly after the divorce, these two factors combine to make the long-term financial effects of divorce, on average, more favorable to mothers than to fathers."
Braver, Sanford L., and Michael E. Lamb. "Marital Dissolution." Handbook of Marriage and the Family (2013): 487-516.
"The underlying theory behind child support guidelines implies that child support orders should change when the incomes of noncustodial parents change. This paper documents changes in noncustodial fathers' earnings over a five-year period and examines the relationship between the changes in earnings and modifications in child support orders. Using detailed longitudinal administrative data from Wisconsin, the authors examine the history of orders and earnings for fathers in couples who had their first child support ordered in 2000. A substantial proportion of fathers experience large changes in earnings, but relatively few of the associated child support orders are modified. Using discrete-time multinomial event history models that consider time-varying variables and control for censored observations, we find some evidence of changes in earnings being associated with changes in orders, all else equal, but the relationship is relatively weak and order changes are not proportional to earnings changes. The findings highlight the challenges and importance of developing policies that result in child support orders being more responsive to changes in fathers' incomes."
Ha, Yoonsook, Maria Cancian, and Daniel R. Meyer. "Unchanging child support orders in the face of unstable earnings." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 29.4 (2010): 799-820.
"The present work is concerned with the economic consequences of marital disruption for both members of the separating couples. Most of the literature on this topic assesses whether there is a large gender bias, with women being exposed to high poverty risks in the aftermath of separation whereas men seem not to experience any dramatic drop in their income and are sometimes even better off after divorce or separation. Some researchers (McManus and DiPrete, 2001) have challenged this evidence, suggesting that the gender bias is less strong than is generally acknowledged, and that men also suffer economically after marital disruption. Here we suggest two issues that are essential to this debate: firstly the conventional measures of well-being (i.e. income and poverty status) are not entirely satisfying. Poverty status creates a distinction between ‘poor’ and ‘non-poor’, but it is not clear which poverty line should be considered appropriate and why. Moreover, income and poverty status do not encapsulate all the dimensions underlying poverty and social exclusion—only the monetary one. We may expect that men are not suffering in monetary terms in the aftermath of separation but they experience an increased deprivation in life style standards all the same because of a rise in expenses due to alimony payments, new dwelling costs, etc. The second issue concerns selection. This is driven by the fact that men and women who are at high risk of entering poverty may be more likely to avoid separation. By using a propensity score matching procedure combined with a difference-in-differences estimator we control for such a selection bias.
We expect that, by using different measures of well-being, we can observe that both men and women experience an economic deprivation after separation, women being more deprived in monetary terms and men in non-monetary terms. The results conform largely to our expectations: it is confirmed that the definition of the poverty threshold is an important issue. Results differ considerably depending on whether we use a 50%, 60% or 70% poverty line. Moreover when we use monetary measures (i.e. poverty status and relative income) it is unquestionable that women suffer a disproportionately larger negative effect than men. Also important is that, by using monetary measures, we find that most of the results are consistent with welfare regime theory. However, the non-monetary measures (i.e. indices of deprivation) provide a different picture. Women are still found to suffer significantly more than men, but it is also clear that men's level of deprivation also increases, and in some cases there is no significant difference between the ATET that is estimated for men and women (this is so in liberal countries when using the overall index of deprivation and the secondary life style deprivation index).
Children play an important role in explaining the gender differences. If there are children in the conjugal dwelling, then mothers are much more likely to be granted custody following a divorce. Thus the divorce event will for many women imply reduced income (poorer access to the husband's income) and a higher relative expenditure. Men, in contrast, are likely to live alone or with parents and are much less likely to experience poverty and financial strain. Considering couples with children only in the analysis of entering poverty, we notice that in liberal and Mediterranean countries the gender gap is even larger, in social democratic countries it is smaller and in the conservative countries it remains virtually unaltered.
However, in terms of deprivation, men do suffer significantly. Many of the items that are used to compute the index of deprivation refer to characteristics of the dwelling. If it is the case that men normally must leave the dwelling following a divorce, they will, in the short run at least, lose out on many of the goods and services that the household would provide. So, although men are not worse off financially, they are worse off in terms of consumer durables and certain expenditure goods. It also seems likely that the new dwelling is often of poorer quality than the original dwelling, which is consistent with our estimates.
The gender difference is clearly smaller when children are not present in the dwelling. With no children, the effect on life style deprivation among men becomes higher, whereas it is slightly smaller for women. One important factor here is that it is less clear which of the spouses will remain in the conjugal dwelling if the couple have no children."
Aassve, Arnstein, et al. "Marital disruption and economic well‐being: a comparative analysis." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 170.3 (2007): 781-799.
"Women seem to be less satisfied with the quality of their pre-divorce relationship which is reflected in the fact that most divorces are filed by women. Generally, the one who initiates divorce has a temporal advantage because he or she has planned the event earlier and has already thought about the consequences. Additionally, the initiator has already confronted himself or herself with the emotions that go along with the decision. This creates a feeling of being more in control of the situation. As a consequence, it is often women who improve their post-divorce situation in the long run in terms of relationship qualities and personal development in the private and the public spheres."
Gaffal, Margit. "Factors Influencing Ex-spouses’ Adjustment to Divorce." Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives of Marital Breakdown. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 47-81.
"We use fifteen years of data to address the economic consequences of divorce. The stark conclusion is that men’s household income increases by about 23% on divorce once we control for household size, whereas women’s household income falls by about 31%. There is partial recovery for women, but this recovery is driven by repartnering: the average effect of repartnering is to restore income to pre-divorce levels after nine years. Those who do not repartner tend to be older and have children. For these individuals, and for those in poor health at the time of divorce, the long-term economic consequences of divorce are serious. For some, these long-term consequences are offset by increased labour supply, but the effects are small, and this ignores any extra costs such as childcare which may arise from working. For others, government provided benefits provide some cushion to the cost of divorce. On the positive side, we present evidence that these costs of divorce for women have been mitigated over time and more recent divorces have not led to the same falls in household income as earlier divorces."
Fisher, Hayley, and Hamish Low. "Who wins, who loses and who recovers from divorce?." Sharing Lives, Dividing Assets. Oxford: Hart Publishing (2009).
"One of the side effects of the sharp rise in divorce rates in most Western developed countries over the last few decades is the increase in the number of single-parent families, most of them headed by women. Because single-mother families are overrepresented among poor families and families who receive welfare support, most of the previous research focused on the profound economic implications of divorce for women and children, and on the discrepancies between the economic outcomes experienced by women and those experienced by men."
Raz-Yurovich, Liat. "Divorce penalty or divorce premium? A longitudinal analysis of the consequences of divorce for men's and women's economic activity." European sociological review 29.2 (2013): 373-385.
Another interesting study:
Braver, Sanford, Ira Ellman, and Robert MacCoun. "Public Intuitions About Fair Child Support Allocations: Converging Evidence for an 'Ability to Contribute' Rule." Available at SSRN 2110376 (2012).
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