Breaks in the Breaks: A Time-Series Analysis of Divorce Rates

The economic literature examining changes in divorce rates is not conclusive since legal reforms have been found to have permanent, transitory or no effect on divorce rates. This paper studies differences in divorce rates among 16 European countries from 1930 to 2006, by exploiting time-series analysis. We find that 37.5% of the divorce rate’s series are stationary, so that any shock had a transitory effect. However, we also detect structural breaks in the average divorce rate for each country that are endogenously located very close to the year of the divorce law legislation (the same year or some years later).