Breaking up is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce and Cohabitation Instability in the United States

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce and the dissolution of cohabiting unions in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data led some analysts to conclude that divorce risk has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in divorce risk between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over 35. Among younger adults, marital dissolution risks are stable or declining. The leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 may reflect increasing selectivity of marriage. Even among the youngest cohorts, however, the stabilization of divorce rates is more than offset by the increasing number of dissolutions of cohabiting unions. In sum, divorce risk has risen sharply in recent years, but if current trends continue it could level off or even decline over the next few decades. Nevertheless, we expect that overall union instability will continue to increase because of the rise of cohabitation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.