Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/55133 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5960
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper explores the role of culture in determining divorce decisions 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 US 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 GDP. Moreover, specifications with country of origin fixed effects suggest that divorce probabilities are especially low for immigrants from countries with low divorce rates that reside amidst a large number of co-ethnics. 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.
Subjects: 
divorce
culture
immigrants
JEL: 
J12
Z13
J61
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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