Culture and Divorce: Evidence from US Immigrants

Transcription

1 Culture and Divorce: Evidence from US Immigrants Delia Furtado, University of Connecticut and IZA Miriam Marcén, University of Zaragoza Almudena Sevilla-Sanz, University of Oxford September 6, 2009 Abstract: This paper explores the role of culture in determining divorce decisions by examining differences in divorce rates by country of origin of immigrants in the United States. Because immigrants who arrived in the US at a young age all share a common set of American laws and institutions, we interpret cross-ancestry differences in divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Using this epidemiological approach, we find that culture has quantitatively significant effects on divorce decisions, more so for women than men. Supplemental analyses suggest the effect of culture is especially strong for immigrants from low divorce countries that reside amidst a large number of co-ethnics. Given the importance of divorce for children s later outcome in life, our findings suggest that policy makers should take cultural effects into consideration when formulating family policies. JEL: J12, Z13 Keywords: Divorce, Culture, Immigrants 1

2 1 Introduction Despite a fairly homogeneous divorce law regime across Europe at present, divorce rates vary substantially across European countries, ranging from 3.84 divorcees per 1,000 inhabitants in Russia to 0.65 in Italy (See Table 1). Many may attribute this variation entirely to cross-country differences in welfare policies and the availability of stable, full-time work for women, but in this paper, we suggest that culture also plays an important role. Because culture and these macro variables move hand and hand, it is impossible to distinguish between them using European data. To identify the effect of culture, we examine divorce patterns among immigrants to the US that arrived as young children. Since they were all exposed to US laws and institutions, we argue that differences in their divorce probabilities can be attributed to differences in culture as opposed to institutions. In the last few decades, more permissive divorce laws, such as laws allowing unilateral divorce, have been have been widely considered to be the main responsible factor behind increases in divorce rates across. Interestingly, the literature suggests remarkable differences in countries reactions to similar law changes (see Poppel and de Beer 1993 for the Netherlands, Smith 1997 for Britain, Allen 1998 for Canada). More recent papers have found that divorce laws in the US and Europe in the past four decades only account for a rather small portion of the increase in divorce rates (see Wolfers 2006 for US, and González and Viitanen 2009 for Europe). Given that divorce laws account for a relatively small proportion of the increases in divorced rates and that divorce rates continue to vary substantially across European countries despite fairly homogeneous divorce laws, it is important to consider other determinants of divorce whicy vary by country. Researchers have found that divorce rates respond to the economic status of women (Bedard and Deschenes 2004), unemployment rates (Jensen and Smith 1990), female labor force participation rates (Johnson and Skinner 1986, Trent and Scott 1989, Allen 1998 ), gender differences in family roles (Kalmijn et al. 2004), sex ratios (Trent and Scott 1989), public transfers and tax laws (Dickert-Colin 1999), property distribution within marriage (Gray 1998), and laws concerning alimony payments, child support, and child custody (Kiernan 2004). This paper considers the role of culture in explaining an individual s probability of being divorced. Following Fernandez (2007), we conceptualize culture as a set of beliefs and preferences that vary across time, space, or social groups. The interrelationship between institutions and norms makes it difficult to rigorously 2

3 disentangle the two. For example, countries in which inhabitants have more liberal attitudes toward divorce enact liberal divorce policies. At the same time, more liberal divorce policies can generate attitudes which are more accepting of divorce. To separate the effect of culture from institutions on an individual s probability of divorce we examine divorce patterns of immigrants who arrived to the US at or under the age of 5. Immigrants in our sample have lived under the laws, institutions, and markets of the United States. However, because the attitudes of these immigrants are likely to reflect the attitudes of their parents and ethnic communities, differences in divorce rates by country of origin may be interpreted as evidence of the importance of culture. Our results contribute to a growing literature on the effect of culture on economic outcomes (See Fernandez and Fogli (2005) for a review of this literature). Using methodologies very similar to ours, fairly recent studies have examined the effect of culture on savings rates (Carroll et al. 1994), female labor force participation (Antecol 2000), workers' shirking performance (Ichino and Maggi 2000), financial development (Guiso et al. 2004), fertility and female labor force participation (Fernandez and Fogli 2006, Fernández 2007), living arrangements (Giuliano 2007), and most recently, unemployment rates (Lausanne 2009). We add to this work by presenting evidence of the importance of culture on divorce decisions. In our empirical analysis, we use the 2000 US Census to estimate the probability that an immigrant who arrived in the US as a young child is divorced based on the person s home country crude divorce rate (CDR), defined as the number of divorces per 1000 inhabitants. Our results suggest that culture plays an important role in explaining divorces even when controlling for age and education as well as a series of country of origin variables including GDP and religiosity. We find that when the CDR increases by one, the probability that an immigrant in the US is divorced increases by almost three percentage points. Our findings are robust to using various measures of divorce culture such as total divorce rates and attitudes about divorce After determining that culture matters, we explore how culture matters. In particular, we find that an increase in the concentration of individuals with the same ancestry leads to a smaller decrease in the probability of being divorced for immigrants from countries with relatively higher crude divorce rates. This suggests that culture is transmitted not only from parent to child but also within communities. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the empirical strategy. Section 3 describes the data and provides the main evidence of the effect of culture on an individual s divorce probability. Section 4 presents evidence of peer effects in the transmission of culture and divorce. Section 5 concludes. 3

4 2 Empirical Strategy Our empirical approach makes use of the fact that all immigrants who arrived in the US at a young age are and have been exposed to the same American markets and institutions. This implies that, if only institutions matter, home country divorce rates should have no effect on the divorce decisions of these immigrants. Conversely, if attitudes about divorce get passed down from generation to generation, then home country divorce rates will have a positive effect on divorce probabilities of immigrants and their children. Thus, cross-country differences in divorce rates might be interpreted as evidence of culture. The following equation forms the empirical framework of this analysis: D ijk = β 1 DR j + β 2 X ijk + δ k + ε ijk (1) where D ijk is an indicator variable for whether individual i of cultural origin j who lives in metropolitan area k is divorced. Our measure of culture, DR j, is the crude divorce rate in country j in the year The vector X ijk, includes individual characteristics, such as age and education, which might affect divorce rates for reasons unrelated to culture. A full set of metropolitan statistical area (MSA) fixed effects, denoted δ k, is included because of regional differences in US divorce rates (see, for instance, Gruber 2004, and Friedberg 1998 for an examination of how divorce rates differ by state). Without MSA fixed effects, if immigrants from countries with high divorce rates tend to settle in cities with high divorce rates, the cultural proxy might be capturing the effect of US divorce laws, rather than the effect of culture. Higher crude divorce rates are assumed to correspond with more liberal cultural attitudes regarding divorce. If culture matters, then individuals originating from countries with more liberal cultures regarding divorce should have a higher probability of divorce than individuals from more traditional backgrounds. Thus, we expect β 1 to be positive Our dependent variable is an indicator for whether an individual s current marital status is divorced. Arguably a more interesting question to ask would be about the effect of culture is on the probability that a person ever divorces (conditional on having ever been married). Unfortunately, there is no data set that contains information on ever being divorced that also meets all of our variable and sample size requirements. This is problematic if remarriage 4

5 rates vary systematically with home country divorce rates. In fact, Figure 1 shows that the percentage of married individuals who report having ever been divorced is higher in those countries which have a high stock of divorcees. This implies that all of our estimates of the effect of culture shown below may be interpreted as lower bounds of the cultural effect on the probability of ever being divorce. 3 Data To conduct the main analysis, we use data from the five percent Public-Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 US census. Our sample consists of those immigrants from Europe who arrived in the US when they were less than five years of age. Although they are foreign born, these immigrants all grew up under US laws, institutions, and markets. However, because the attitudes of these immigrants are likely to reflect the attitudes of their ancestry communities, we argue that differences in divorce rates by country of origin can be interpreted as evidence of the importance of culture. Given that marriage is a prerequisite of divorce and we do not aim to study marriage decisions, we further restrict the sample to those who are either married or divorced. 2 Finally, we keep only those immigrants whose first reported ancestry corresponds to their country of birth. For the main analysis, we use the Crude Divorce Rate (CDR) in 2000 in the immigrant s country of origin as our cultural proxy. 3 The CDR, is defined as the number of divorces per thousand midyear inhabitants. According to the U.N. Demographic Yearbook, where we obtain the data on crude divorce rates, divorce is defined as the final legal dissolution of marriage, conferring on both involved parties the right to remarry as defined by the laws of each country. Previous literature using the epidemiological approach to identify the effect of culture (e.g. Fernandez and Fogli 2009, Guiliano 2007) typically uses second-generation immigrants instead of first generation childhood arrivers. Unfortunately, after 1970, the US Census stopped asking for parents country of birth and so researchers studying the second-generation must choose between data from 1970 or merging together several years from the 2 See Gray (1988) for a discussion of how limiting the sample in this way takes marriage selection into account. 3 Choosing the same year for the cultural proxy as in our main data set reflects the idea that an immigrant s behaviour is best characterized by the current individual behaviour in his or her country of origin. Another approach would have been to use previous CDRs as our cultural proxies. In particular, given that the average person in our sample is 49 years old on average, the parents of marriageable age foreign-born individuals in our sample in 2000 most probably arrived in the US by 1950s or in previous years. It could thus be argued that it is the divorce rates in the country of origin in those years that should drive divorce probabilities. We experimented with using the crude divorce rate in different years and results remained robust. The fact that there were no big differences is not surprising, however, given that culture evolves slowly (see Fernandez, 2007). 5

6 Current Population Survey (CPS). Because divorce laws in Europe and in the US have changed so dramatically since 1970, we did not feel comfortable in using the older data. Although we considered using CPS data, small sample sizes would have made it impossible to conduct the supplementary analyses discussed in Section 5. Moreover, given our focus on understanding the role of culture in explaining European divorce rates, there is reason to favour a sample of childhood arrivers over the native-born children of immigrants. Certainly, home country culture is more important for a first generation immigrant than a native with one foreign born parent who might have arrived as a young child. Thus, our estimates of the role of culture will more closely resemble the effect of culture in Europe than if we had used a sample of second-generation immigrants. Our final sample consists of 13,138 immigrants from 22 different countries. 4 Table 1 presents summary statistics of the relevant variables by country of origin, ordered by crude divorce rate. Column (1) shows large CDR variation across countries: from 3.84 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants in the Russia to 0.65 in Italy. The other columns describe our PUMS sample. Overall, 14.8% of individuals are divorced, but Southern Europeans, Poles, Irish, and people from Romania or Bulgaria are significantly less likely to be divorced than the average. Immigrants from Portugal, Spain, Greece and Germany tend to be younger than other groups suggesting a relatively more recent arrival of these groups to the US. About 30% of the immigrants have at least a college degree, although education levels range widely across ancestries with Portugal having the lowest proportion of immigrants with at least a college degree (14%) and Finland the highest (42%). 4 Results 4.1 Baseline Results Table 3 reports the estimates for the main specification. Standard errors are clustered at the country of origin level. As can be seen in the first column, an increase in the crude divorce rate in an immigrant s country of origin is associated with an increase in the probability that that immigrant is divorced. In column 2, controls for age, gender, and education are added to the specification. Although other studies have found that older people are less likely to 4 United Kingdom includes England, Scotland and Wales. Czechoslovakia includes the Czech Republic. Russia includes the Russian Federation, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. We group Romania and Bulgaria together because they are culturally similar, and we have few observations for each of them separately. 6

7 get divorced conditional on being married (Peters 1986), our results indicate that older people are more likely to be divorced presumably because they have had more time to have ended a marriage. Males are less likely to be divorced, most probably because they are more likely to get remarried. Consistent with the divorce literature, higher levels of education are associated with lower probabilities of divorce, and the college-educated have especially low divorce rates (Becker et al. 1977, Peters 1986). More importantly, the inclusion of these variables has no effect on our parameter of interest the estimated effect of the CDR in the country of origin. 5 In the third column, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) fixed effects are added to the model and the estimated coefficient on the divorce cultural proxy decreases by almost 25%. This suggests that immigrants from high divorce rate countries are more likely to reside in high divorce US cities. In the end, our estimates indicate that when the number of divorces per thousand in an immigrant s home country increases by one, there is a two and a half percentage point increase in the probability that an immigrant gets a divorce. Interpretation of the cultural proxy coefficient is difficult because there may be other determinants of divorce which vary by country of origin, but have little to do with culture. For example, immigrants from poor countries may have lower incomes in the US, even conditional on education. Given the negative relationship between household income and the probability of divorce (Becker et al. 1977), this may lead to a biased coefficient on the crude divorce rate. In Column 4, we add home country GDP (obtained from UN Statistics and measured in thousands of current US dollars) to the model, and there is no change in the estimated CDR coefficient. Another potential source of bias stems from the importance of religion and religiosity in divorce decisions. A person s divorce tendencies are surely related to personal religious beliefs which may have nothing to do with culture or surrounding members of the community. For this reason, we would have liked to include a measure of religiosity to our model, but unfortunately this information is not available in the US Census. Instead, we add to the model a country of origin level variable measuring the percentage of the home country population which attends religious services weekly. As shown in Column 4, immigrants from more religious countries are significantly less likely to be divorced, and when this variable is added to the model, the CDR coefficient remains positive and significant but decreases slightly in magnitude. It is difficult to interpret the decrease in the magnitude of the cultural proxy coefficient because religiosity and culture are so intimately intertwined. More socially liberal countries surely 5 We also ran regressions with a control for wage income. Results were qualitatively the same, but because of endogeneity concerns, we prefer the simpler specification. 7

8 have more lenient attitudes toward divorce and are surely less religious. In most contexts, the practice of religion is very social, making it very difficult to separate culture from religion even within a thought experiment. For this reason, we treat the CDR coefficient in the model as a lower bound of the effect of divorce culture, but continue our analysis omitting both the GDP and religiosity variables from our model. Similar stories can be told with regards to adding average at first marriage and total fertility rates to the model. As can be seen in columns 6 and 7, both have insignificant effects on divorce probabilities and their inclusion does not significantly change the coefficient on crude divorce rates. 4.2 Other Cultural Proxies A country s crude divorce rate is not the only possible measure of attitudes toward divorce. Table 4 presents results for the main specification using different measures of divorce culture. To simplify comparisons, we reproduce the preferred specification from Table 2 in Column 1. In the second column, we substitute the origin country s crude divorce rate, defined as the number of divorces per 1000 inhabitants, with the country s total divorce rate, defined as the number of divorces per 1000 married inhabitants. The same country may have a relatively high total divorce rate but low crude divorce if it has a relatively small proportion of the population which is married. This measurement difficulty is likely to be exacerbated if, as the evidence seems to suggest, countries where divorce is more common also have higher cohabitation and lower marriage rates. Because the crude divorce rate is a more standard measure of a country s divorce tendencies, it is our preferred variable, but the results shown in Column 2 of Table 3 indicate that total divorce rates also have a positive and significant effect on divorce probabilities. This implies that it is actually divorce tendencies, as opposed to the marriage tendencies, that are driving our results. Despite the almost universal adoption of unilateral and no-fault divorce laws in Europe by the year 2000, differences in the timing of divorce law changes may result in different divorce rates even if attitudes about divorce are similar across countries. For example, researchers have found that unilateral divorce laws result in temporary spikes in the crude divorce rate (see Wolfers (2006) for the US and Gonzalez and Viitanen (2009) for Europe) which, given that culture evolves slowly over time, presumably do not measure actual changes in attitudes about divorce. Concerned that our results may be driven by abnormally high divorce rates among late universal divorce law adopters, we examined a more direct measure of attitudes about divorce: the percentage of the country s 8

9 population believing that divorce is never justifiable. 6 As seen in Column 3, this cultural proxy for divorce also has a significant impact on divorce rates of immigrants residing the US. A ten percentage point increase in the proportion of people believing that divorce is never justifiable results in a.2 point decrease in the probability that an immigrant is divorced. Because of the potential disconnect between what people say in a survey and their genuine attitudes, the crude divorce rate remains our preferred measure of culture, but again, it is comforting that the results are not sensitive to our choice of cultural proxy. 7 An alternative strategy used in the literature is to include dummy variables for the various countries of origin instead of controlling directly for the divorce rates in these countries (e.g., Carroll et al. 1994, Giuliano 2007, Antecol 2000). This approach does not impose any restrictions on the home country effects, whereas our estimation method from Equation (1) imposes the requirement that the cultural effect is linear in the home country divorce rate. Robustness checks, not shown, suggest that the two approaches lead to similar conclusions. 4.3 Gender and Culture Higher incomes of husbands are associated with smaller likelihoods of divorce while the earnings potentials of women are associated with increases in the probability of divorce, if anything (Burgess et al. 2003, Jalovaara 2003). It may be that culture, like income, has different effects on men and women. Interestingly, Fernandez and Fogli (2009) find that husband s culture has a larger effect than own culture on women s work decisions. Table 4 presents results separately for males and females. The first and third columns show that in models with no controls, females are more heavily influenced by culture than males. In the full specification, shown in the second and fourth columns, both coefficients decrease, but females remain about? percent more sensitive to home country divorce rates than males. 6 Information about divorce attitudes was obtained from the World Values Surveys (WVS). Respondents are asked whether they think that divorce can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between. (1 Never justifiable,2,, 10 Always Justifiable). Data is available for four waves , , and We pool all the waves together since there is no wave in which all countries considered are available. We have also run further tests using wave 2 ( ), which includes information for all countries considered except Greece, and wave 4 ( ), which includes information for all countries except Switzerland and Norway. 7 There is generally a negative relationship between crude divorce rates and the percentage of the population believing that divorce is never justifiable, but Spain and Greece have particularly favorable attitudes toward divorce conditional on their very low divorce rates. This may explain the relatively high proportion of Spanish divorcees in the US. 9

10 5 Cultural Transmission Up until this point, we have considered whether culture is an important determinant of divorce. In this section, we explore how divorce culture gets transmitted from person to person. Parents certainly instil in their children a set of values about family and divorce which gets passed down from generation to generation. In fact, this vertical transmission of culture is often cited as a possible explanation for why children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced themselves (Gruber 2004). However, culture can also be horizontally transmitted through the ethnic communities in which immigrants and their children typically live. Local communities can preserve culture either by providing role models for acceptable family arrangements or by punishing behavior which is different from the norm (see Fernandez and Fogli 2009). Several papers have found that communities whose members are more social integrated (as measured by church membership, urbanicity, and population change) have lower divorce rates (Glenn and Shelton 1985, Breault and Kposowa 1987). Since European divorce rates are higher than US divorce rates (see Table 1), if culture is transmitted within local communities, then we might expect that immigrants living in predominantly ethnic communities will be less likely to divorce than immigrants living amidst Americans. Moreover, the effect of ethnic concentration should be particularly strong for immigrants in ethnic groups with especially low divorce rates. To formalize ideas, consider the following equation: D = X + δ + γ + e ijk α1 Pjk + α 2Pjk * DR j + α3 ijk j k ijk where D ijk is an indicator variable for whether individual i of cultural origin j living in MSA k is divorced. The proportion of people in the immigrant s metropolitan area from the same country of origin is denoted, P jk, while δ j is a series of country of origin fixed effects and e ijk is an error term. The other variables are defined as before. Given that US divorce rates are higher than European divorce rates, if culture is transmitted within communities, we expect that an increase in the concentration of individuals from one s country of origin should result in a decrease in divorce rates so α 1 should be negative. The country of origin fixed effects will pick up any determinant of divorce which varies by country of origin. This certainly includes the country of origin crude divorce 10

11 rate used in our original specification, but the fixed effects will also control for unobserved country of origin variables as well as person-specific determinants of divorce which happen to be correlated within ancestry. Our variable of interest is the interaction between ethnic concentration and the crude divorce rate in one s country of origin. As discussed above, an increase in the concentration of same-ethnicity immigrants should decrease divorce rates less for immigrants from countries with relatively high divorce rates. For example, since the crude divorce rate in Russia is higher than the crude divorce rate in Italy, an increase in the concentration of sameethnicity immigrants should have a less negative effect on Russians than Italians. Thus, we expect that α 2 will be positive. Table 5 presents regression results. As can be seen in the first column, the ethnic concentration has a negative but insignificant effect on divorce rates. When country of origin fixed effects are added in the second column, the concentration coefficient increases in magnitude, but remains statistically insignificant. Although the coefficients on the country of birth dummy variables are not shown in the table, all but three are statistically significant suggesting that divorce culture plays a role in divorce decisions. Most interesting, however, is the finding that an increase in the concentration of immigrants leads to a smaller decrease in the probability of being divorced for immigrants from countries with relatively higher crude divorce rates. For example, a ten percentage point increase in the concentration of same ethnicity leads to a 2.9 percentage point decrease in the probability of being divorced for Italians since the crude divorce rate in Italy is 0.65, but a 1.7 percentage point increase for Russians since the Russian crude divorce rate is An attractive feature of this approach is that it can speak to some of the potential sources of bias in our main specification. By replacing the crude divorce rate with country of origin dummy variables, we can control for all of the individual characteristics that are correlated with home country divorce rates but that cannot be interpreted as culture. Identification of culture in this model results form the interaction of divorce rates with ethnic concentration. There may also be problems with this method of identification, but it is comforting that the different methods of identifying culture point to the same basic conclusion: The differences in divorce rates in Europe cannot be explained entirely by laws and institutions. Our evidence suggests that culture plays an important role. 6 Conclusion 11

12 This paper aims at rigorously disentangling the effects of markets and institutions from the effects of culture in determining divorce decisions. Because immigrants that arrived in the US as very young children absorb home country culture from their parents and ethnic communities but are exposed to US laws and institutions, we interpret the effect of home country divorce rates on their own divorce probabilities as evidence of the role of culture. We find that origin country divorce rates have economically and statistically significant effects on their probabilities of being divorced. We view our results as strong evidence that cross-country variation in divorce laws, welfare policies, and economic conditions in Europe cannot entirely explain the observed variation in divorce rates. Using several techniques, we make a case for the importance of culture in divorce decisions, but acknowledge that our list of controls is rather limited. Determinants of divorce not considered in our analysis include age at marriage, marriage order, premarital childbearing (White 1990), economic factors (Weiss and Willis 1997, Böheim and Ermisch 2001), fertility (Waite and Lillard 1991), religiosity (Trent and Scott 1989, Lehrer and Chiswick 1993), and premarital cohabitation (Lillard et al 1995). Our omission of these variables is partly due to data limitations, but it is unclear whether we would want to include a long list of controls even had the data been available. Attitudes about divorce may impact divorce rates through fertility, religion, and cohabitation decisions and so including these controls would limit the avenues through which culture is allowed to operate. All in all, we view our results as evidence in favor of the role of culture but believe that an examination of the mechanisms through which culture operates is an interesting question for future research. We also note that our identification strategies surely yield lower bounds on the effect of culture in Europe since we focus on immigrants arriving in the US at a young age. Given their decisions to leave Europe, the parents of these immigrants may not be representative of their home country populations. More importantly, childhood arrivers are surely affected by US norms and customs in addition to home country culture. Our results can provide insights into the short term and long term effects of changes in divorce-related policies. Given that culture varies by country, similar changes in divorce laws and welfare policies may have very different effects on divorce outcomes. For this reason, it is important for policy-makers to carefully consider culture when adopting new laws. Moreover, policies resulting in small short term increases in divorce rates may have large long term effects because of the way culture responds to changes in laws. We leave the examination of these potential multiplier effects for future research. 12

13 There is a large literature studying the effects of divorce on the socioeconomic outcomes of women and children. Children with divorced parents are typically less well educated, have lower family incomes, marry earlier but separate more often, and have higher odds of adult suicide (see Gruber 2004). On the other hand, women residing in states where divorce is more accessible experience less domestic violence and lower suicide risks (Stevenson and Wolfers 2006). Given the strong influence of divorce, it is crucial to carefully consider all of its determinants as well as how and why they matter. References Allen, D.A., No-fault divorce in Canada: Its cause and effect, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Vol. 37 (1998) Antecol, H. (2000), An Examination of Cross-Country Differences in the Gender Gap In Labor Force Participation Rates, Labour Economics 7, Becker, G.S., Landes; E.M. and M. Robert T., An Economic Analysis of Marital Instability, Journal of Political Economy, December 1977, 85, Bedard, Kelly and Olivier Deschenes. Sex Preferences, Marital Dissolution, and the Economic Status of Women. Journal of Human Resources. Borjas, George (1993). "The Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants," Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 11(1), pages , January. Borjas, George (1995). "Ethnicity, Neighborhoods, and Human-Capital Externalities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(3), pages , June. Breault, K. D., & Kposowa, A. J. (1987). Explaining divorce in the United States: A study of 3,111 counties in Journal of Marriage and the Family, 49, Burgess, Simon, Carol Propper, and Arnstein Aassve. (2003) The role of income in marriage and divorce transitions among young Americans, Journal Population Economics. 16: Carroll, C., B. Rhee, and C. Rhee (1994). Are there Cultural Effects on Saving? Some Cross-Sectional Evidence, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109. Dickert-Conlin, Stacy. Taxes and transfers: their effects on the decision to end a marriage, Journal of Public Economics 73 (1999) Ermisch, J. & R. Böheim (2001). "Partnership dissolution in the UK: the Role of Economic ircumstances", Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63(2),

14 Fernández, R., and A. Fogli (2005), Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility, NBER Working Paper No Fernández; R. (2007). Women, Work, and Culture, Journal of the European Economic Association, 5(2-3), Fernandez, Raquel and Alessandra Fogli (2006). "Fertility: The Role of Culture and Family Experience," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 4(2-3), pages , Friedberg, Leora Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates? Evidence from Panel Data. American Economic Review, 88(3): Giuliano, Paola (2007). "Living Arrangements in Western Europe: Does Cultural Origin Matter?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 5(5), pages , 09. Glenn, N. D., & Shelton, B. A. (1985). Regional differences in divorce in the United States. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 47, González, L., and T. K. Viitanen, (2009). The Effect of Divorce Laws on Divorce Rates in Europe European Economic Review 53: Gray, J. S., (1998). Divorce-Law Changes, Household Bargaining, and Married Women s Labor Supply, American Economic Review, 88: Gruber, Jonathan Is Making Divorce Easier Bad for Children? The Long-Run Implications of Unilateral Divorce. Journal of Labor Economics, 22(4): Guiso, L., P. Sapienza and L. Zingales (2004), The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development, American Economic Review 94(3), Guiso, L., P. Sapienza and L. Zingales (2006), Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes, Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2), Heaton, Tim B. and Ashley M. Blake. Gender Differences in Determinants of Marital Disruption, Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 20, No. 1, (1999). Ichino, A. and G. Maggi (2000), Work Environment and Individual Background: Explaining Regional Shirking Differentials in a Large Italian Firm, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(3), Marika Jalovaara The Joint Effects of Marriage Partners' Socioeconomic Positions on the Risk of Divorce Demography, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp Jensen, P. & N. Smith (1990). "Unemployment and Marital Dissolution", Journal of Population Economics, 3, Johnson, W.R. & J. Skinner (1986). "Labor Supply and Marital Separation", American Economic Review 76 (June), Matthijs Kalmijn, Paul M. De Graaf and Anne Rigt Poortman 2004 Interactions Between Cultural and Economic Determinants of Divorce in The Netherlands Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 66 Issue 1, Pages Kiernen, K. (2004) Redrawing the Boundaries of Marriage, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 66, Lillard, L.A., M.J. Brien & L.J. Waite (1995). "Premarital Cohabitation and Subsequent Marital Dissolution: A Matter of Self-Selection?" Demography, 32(3),

15 Peters, H. E., (1986), Marriage and Divorce: Informational Constraints and Private Contracting American Economic Review, 76(3): Poppel, F. van, and J. de Beer, (1993). Measuring the Effect of Changing Legislation on the Frequency of Divorce: The Netherlands, , Demography, 30: Smith, I., (1997). Explaining the Growth of Divorce in Great Britain, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 44: Scott J. South The Geographic Context of Divorce: Do Neighborhoods Matter? Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Aug., 2001), pp Stevenson, Betsey and Justin Wolfers (2006). Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(1). Tabellini, G. (2005), Culture and Institutions: Economic Development in the Regions of Europe, CESifo Working Paper No Katherine Trent and Scott J. South (1989). Structural Determinants of the Divorce Rate: A Cross-Societal Analysis, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp Linda J. Waite and Lee A. Lillard (1991). Children and Marital Disruption, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 96, No. 4, pp Weiss, Y. & R.J. Willis (1997). "Match Quality, New Information, and Marital Dissolution", J o u r n a l o f L a b o r E c o n o m i c s, 15(l), White L.K. (1990). Determinants of Divorce: A Review of Research in the Eighties, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 52, No. 4, Family Research in the 1980s: The Decade in Review pp Wolfers, Justin (2006). "Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages , December. 15

16 Figure 1 Remarriage Percent Ever Divorced Spain Italy Ireland Belgium Poland Greece Portugal Czech Republic Denmark USSR United Kingdom Hungary Norway Netherlands Finland Romania Austria France and Bulgaria Switzerland Sweden Germany Percent Divorced in 2000s coef.=1.184 std.err.=0.232 Note: Percent ever divorced: World Values Survey ( ). Percent divorced in 2000s Historical Supplement of the Un Demographic Yearbook. 16

17 Table 1: Descriptive Statistics by Country of Origin in 2000 Crude Divorce Rate High Some College Countries 2000 Male Age School College + Obs. Russia Czechoslovakia Denmark Finland Belgium United Kingdom Austria Sweden Hungary Germany Norway Netherlands France Portugal Switzerland Romania and Bulgaria Poland Greece Spain Ireland Italy Average Std. Dev Note: Sample consists of immigrants who arrived at US under 5 years old and whose ancestry corresponds to the same country in which they were born and who are either married or divorced (2000 US census 5 % sample). Ancestries ordered from higher to lower Crude divorce rates in 2000.Weighted to reflect underlying microdata. In Column (1) we include our cultural proxy the crude divorce rate in United Kingdom includes England, Scotland and Wales. Czechoslovakia includes Czech Republic. Russia includes Russian Federation, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia 17

18 Table 2: Baseline Regressions Dependent Variable: Divorced (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Crude Divorce Rate 0.037*** 0.037*** 0.028*** 0.028*** 0.026*** 0.028*** 0 (0.005) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.003) (0.004) Age 0.013*** 0.014*** 0.014*** 0.013*** 0.014*** 0 (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) Age, squared *** *** *** *** *** -0 (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) Male *** *** *** *** *** -0 (0.006) (0.007) (0.007) (0.007) (0.007) High School Graduate or GED *** *** *** *** *** -0 (0.013) (0.015) (0.015) (0.015) (0.016) Some College * ** ** ** ** - (0.022) (0.021) (0.021) (0.021) (0.021) Bachelors Degree *** *** *** *** *** -0 (0.024) (0.022) (0.022) (0.023) (0.023) Origin Country: GDP (0.001) Origin Country: Percent Weekly Church Attendance (0.000) Origin Country: Average Female Age at First Marriage (0.002) Origin Country: Total Fertility Rate Constant 0.081*** *** (0.009) (0.040) (0.306) (0.304) (0.309) (0.286) MSA Fixed Effects No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Observations R-squared Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1 18

19 Table 3: Other Proxies for Divorce Culture Dependent Variable: Divorced (1) (2) (3) Age 0.014*** 0.013*** 0.013*** (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) Age, squared *** *** *** (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) Male *** *** *** (0.007) (0.007) (0.007) High School Graduate or GED *** *** *** (0.015) (0.015) (0.016) Some College ** ** ** (0.021) (0.021) (0.021) Bachelors Degree *** *** *** (0.022) (0.023) (0.024) Crude Divorce Rate 0.028*** (0.004) Total Divorce Rate 0.015*** (0.002) % Saying Divorce Never Justifiable ** (0.001) Constant (0.306) (0.305) (0.317) MSA Fixed Effects Yes Yes Yes Observations R-squared Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1 19

20 Table 4: Gender Differences in Effect of Culture Dependent Variable: Divorced (1) (2) (3) (4) Males Females Home Country CDR 0.028*** 0.020*** 0.045*** 0.038*** (0.003) (0.004) (0.009) (0.009) Age 0.013*** 0.015*** (0.002) (0.003) Age, squared *** *** (0.000) (0.000) Male (0.000) (0.000) High School Graduate or GED *** (0.016) (0.023) Some College ** (0.024) (0.031) Bachelors Degree *** ** (0.023) (0.034) Constant 0.080*** *** (0.005) (0.327) (0.016) (0.306) MSA Fixed Effects No Yes No Yes Observations R-squared Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1 20

21 Table 5: Cultural Transmission Dependent Variable: Divorced (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Proportion of MSA Same Ancestry ** *** (0.092) (0.069) (0.093) (0.077) (0.064) Home Country CDR 0.028*** 0.020*** (0.004) (0.006) Proportion of MSA Same Ancestry 0.109** 0.145*** X CDR (0.043) (0.038) Constant (0.309) (0.308) (0.305) (0.295) (0.295) MSA Fixed Effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Country of Origin Fixed Effects No No No Yes Yes Observations R-squared Robust standard errors, clustered on country of origin, in parentheses. All specifications include age and education controls. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1 21