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The novelty of the term is the ‘hybrid’ format of the seminar. You are highly encouraged to attend the seminar in person on campus, but under the current circumstances attendance is limited. Please register on the doodle using this link: https://doodle.com/poll/nr58uwf9nfiy2egw. You can also follow the IRES Lunch Seminar via this link on Teams. For non-UCLouvain participants, please email the organizers if you wish to participate. |
Fabio Blasutto
IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain
will give a presentation on
The Rise of Cohabitation and Unilateral Divorce
This paper analyzes the role of unilateral divorce for the rise of cohabitation. Exploiting the staggered introduction of unilateral divorce across the US states, we show that after the reform singles become more likely to cohabit than to marry, and that newly formed cohabitations last longer. We then provide a theoretical rationale for these facts, building a life-cycle model with partnership choice, female labor force participation and saving decisions. A structural estimation of the model suggests that unilateral divorce decreases couples' stability, which makes cohabitation preferred to couples that would have been at high risk of divorce. Since cohabiting couples formed after the reform are better matched, the average length of cohabitations increases. A counterfactual experiment reveals that the time spent cohabiting would have been halved if divorce laws had never changed.
Joint with Egor Kozlov (Northwestern University)