Socioeconomic Determinants of Marital Dissolution in Puerto Rico

165 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988.The formation of female-headed households with their high rate of poverty is one of the consequences of marital instability. This study examines the socioeconomic determinants of the probability of marital dissolution from legal and consensual marriages in Puerto Rico, and hence the formation of female-headed households.The theoretical approach is the economic theory of marital dissolution developed by Becker, Landes, and Michael (1977). The probability of martial dissolution is seen as a function of gains from marriage, cost of dissolution, unexpected outcomes, and other variables. Gains variables in the empirical model include potential earnings and education of husbands and wives; cost variables include religion, presence and number of children, and length of marriage; unexpected outcomes are measured by the timing of wives labor force participation and fertility impairment. Control variables include age at marriage, marriage cohort, urbanism, and premarital pregnancy.The data come from the Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment (PRFFPA) collected in Puerto Rico during 1982. Ever married women 15-49 years of age excluding widows, are the 2,125 subjects identified for this study. Due to missing values on some independent variables, the final sample was 2,116 subjects for empirical analysis of first marriages and 362 for second marriages.Logit analysis is used to obtain a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) separately for the overall probability of marital dissolution and the probability at each of four five-year marriage duration segments for first marriages and the first five-year segment of second marriages. The variables included explain better the probability of marital dissolution of short first marriages than of long first or of second marriages. The presence and number of children less than six years of age and the religious participation of wives are found to be the main deterrents to marital dissolution. In addition, increased age at marriage of the wife (up to approximately 30 years) decreases the probability of marital dissolution. Factors having the greatest positive effect on marital dissolution are: the participation of wives in the labor force (especially starting participation during the marriage), living in a metropolitan area, and being in a consensual rather than a legal marriage.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD