Exploring the Life-Long Costs of Divorce
New study outlines the impacts of divorce on children in the U.S., from reduced earnings to increased likelihood of teen births, time in jail
A new working paper using a novel dataset highlights the economic and social effects of divorce on children in the United States. The study shows that children whose parents divorce when they are age 5 or younger have marked disadvantages over the life course, including reduced earnings as adults, and an increased likelihood of experiencing a teen pregnancy, incarceration, and an early death.
While the study is not yet published, it has been made available by the U.S. Census Bureau. The authors include Associate Professor Nolan Pope of the Department of Economics, as well as economists at the University of California, Merced, and the Census Bureau.
The paper focuses on the years after the legal event of a divorce, showing that—in addition to a household’s income splitting in half, and the costly necessity of two dwellings—there are long-term struggles to financially and socially recover from this event over the next two decades.
The researchers linked together data from federal tax records, the Social Security Administration, and the Census Bureau to offer this uniquely comprehensive socioeconomic summary of divorce. These data allowed the researchers to study more than 5 million children impacted by divorce in the United States.
The authors were able to study two significant gaps in the current understanding of divorce.
“First, we look at how family life changed at the time of divorce. We find that household income drops by half as families divide into separate households, and the members of the households only recover about half of this initial income loss over the next decade. We also show that the probability of moving nearly triples, and families relocate to neighborhoods with 7 percent lower incomes. Half of parents remarry within five years, introducing stepparents to children’s lives, and adding more dependents to the household after divorce,” Pope said.
“Second, we find that siblings who are exposed to a divorce earlier and for longer in their childhood have worse adult outcomes. Children who experience a parental divorce before the age of 5—compared to children who experience a parental divorce in their 20s—have reduced adult earnings and college residence, while also having an increased likelihood of incarceration, mortality, and teen births,” Pope explained. “These effects are fairly large. For instance, the reduction in income from experiencing a parental divorce before the age of 5 is similar to the reduction in income from attending one fewer year of school. Similarly, experiencing a parental divorce before the age of 5 increases teen births by roughly 60 percent.”
The researchers found that both parents adjust their labor supply after divorce as well, with mothers working 8 percent more hours and fathers 16 percent more hours after divorce. “As such, a lot of things within family life change after a divorce occurs,” Pope said.
The immediacy of the outcomes that children statistically were striking to the researchers.
“I was surprised that almost immediately after divorce, we found children had an increased likelihood of having a teen birth and increased mortality levels. It appears that changes for children after divorces start to occur within just a year or two,” Pope said. “These impacts continue through their life, and we see negative impacts on children later in life as well.”
Given all the impacts outlined in the paper, the researchers describe divorce as not an “isolated legal shock,” but as representing, as Pope puts it, “a bundle of treatments— including income loss, neighborhood changes, and family restructuring—each of which might affect children’s outcomes.”
Recognizing there are nuances and personal struggles that are impossible to study or to quantify, Pope acknowledges that the study does not examine the costs of staying in an unhappy or harmful marriage. He said that the results of this study are for the average of all divorces: therefore, he notes the likely existence of a subset of divorces, such as those from dysfunctional or abusive households, that have significant benefits for children and for the parents who divorce.
“As such, I would not want our results to deter someone from an abusive or highly damaging relationship from seeking help and potentially getting divorced,” Pope said. “Our results only speak to the impact on a subset of children's outcomes. There are many additional dimensions of divorce—particularly the impact on the lives and happiness of the parents—that our study is unable to address, which are also important when making decisions about divorce.”
Published on Wed, May 28, 2025 - 1:06PM