The effect of moving on union dissolution

This paper examines the effect of migration and residential mobility on union dissolution among married and cohabiting couples. Moving is a stressful life event, and a large, multidisciplinary litera-ture has shown that family migration often benefi ts one partner (usually the man) more than the other. Even so, no study to date has examined the possible impact of within-nation geographical mobility on union dissolution. We base our longitudinal analysis on retrospective event-history data from Austria. Our results show that couples who move frequently have a signifi cantly higher risk of union dissolu-tion, and we suggest a variety of mechanisms that may explain this. his paper considers the infl uence of residential mobility and migration on union dissolution. The nature of union dissolution means that at least one partner will almost certainly move after the event (Asher and Bloom 1982; Flowerdew and Al-Hamad 2004; Grundy 1985; Sullivan 1986). To date, however, we can fi nd no studies that have mod-eled the infl uence of internal (that is, within-nation) migration and residential mobility on subsequent union dissolution. This lack of previous studies is surprising because there are several reasons to expect that such an infl uence might exist. First, moving to a new home is acknowledged as a relatively stressful life event, and the occurrence of stressful events in