Household dissolution is a key concern in family economics, with implications for individual welfare, child outcomes, income trajectories, or wealth, which ultimately impact inequality and vulnerability. This paper examines how wage dynamics relate to the stability of dual-earner households, using a collective model with limited commitment, where spouses commit to future behavior subject to individual rationality constraints, allowing for renegotiation of intrahousehold arrangements or household dissolution. We use data from the PSID over 1999-2019, and estimate how spouses’ wage changes relate to divorce, accounting for observed behaviors, demographics, and unobserved heterogeneity. The results show that large negative wage changes significantly increase the likelihood of divorce, while positive changes have no effect, as the model predicts. This pattern is consistent with asymmetric intrahousehold insurance, highlighting the role of economic risk and bargaining asymmetries in shaping family dynamics, and informs policies targeting household vulnerability to income shocks.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.