Unlucky at Work, Unlucky in Love

Employment Status and Marital Stability

Abstract

This paper analyses whether employment termination has an impact on marital stability. Using discrete survival analysis techniques, we show that a husband’s involuntary job loss is associated with an increase in the risk of divorce by roughly 70 percent in the following period. The estimated relative risk of divorce is generally higher for involuntary job losses than for other types of employment termination. This result holds for both husband’s who remained unemployed after the employment termination as well as those who have found a new job. However, the relation appears to be short term, typically decreasing in magnitude after the first period and becoming insignificant in some cases in the second or later years (in a new position).