Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
June 15, 2013
Summary:
This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.
Published in
Demography
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 50 , p.1 -1
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0180-2
ISSN
703370
Subjects
Notes
Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*
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