摘要：Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a
woman’s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous
variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic outcomes, and has
concluded that divorce has little effect on women’s average household income.
Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of
marital breakup throughout the income distribution, however, we find that
divorce greatly increases the probability that a woman lives in a household with
income in the bottom quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal
earnings with child support, welfare, combining households, and substantially
increasing their labor supply, divorce significantly increases the odds that a
woman with children is poor.
关键词：marital breakup, earnings of women, poverty, children
