No-Fault Divorce Laws, Women’s Mortality, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. States

• In Event: Policy Perspectives on Relationship Stability and Divorce

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1960s, U.S. states adopted no-fault divorce laws, allowing couples to dissolve marriages without proving wrongdoing. These reforms represent a major institutional shift in family policy, with potentially important implications for women’s economic security and wellbeing. While prior research has examined effects on divorce rates, household bargaining, and labor supply, less is known about how these policies affect women’s health, particularly mortality.This paper examines how the staggered adoption of no-fault divorce laws affected women’s mortality and labor market outcomes in the United States. I focus on women ages 15 to 64 and analyze cause-specific mortality, including homicide, suicide, and alcohol-related deaths. The analysis uses publicly available CDC mortality data merged with SEER population counts for 1968 to 1988, along with CPS ASEC microdata to study labor market responses.To estimate causal effects, I implement a difference-in-differences framework that exploits variation in the timing of no-fault divorce adoption across states. Mortality outcomes are modeled using a Poisson specification with state and year fixed effects and population exposure. Labor market outcomes are constructed from CPS microdata aggregated to the state-year level.The results indicate that the introduction of no-fault divorce laws is associated with an increase in female mortality in the years following adoption. The effects are largest for homicide and alcohol-related mortality, while effects on suicide are smaller. In contrast, I find little evidence of significant changes in overall female employment following these reforms.These findings suggest that while no-fault divorce laws expanded legal access to marital dissolution, they may also have had unintended consequences for women’s health. This highlights the importance of considering broader health impacts when evaluating family policy reforms. Ongoing work explores potential mechanisms, including changes in economic conditions, household stability, and exposure to violence, and extends the analysis to additional labor market outcomes such as labor force participation, hours worked, and earnings.

Author

• Syeda Marjana Razzak, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author