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Three Essays on the Quality of Marriage Syracuse University SURFACE Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Economics - Dissertations Affairs 6-2012 Three Essays on the Quality of Marriage Jose V. Gallegos Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/ecn_etd Part of the Economics Commons Recommended Citation Gallegos, Jose V., "Three Essays on the Quality of Marriage" (2012). Economics - Dissertations. 93. https://surface.syr.edu/ecn_etd/93 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Economics - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract In these essays I focus on issues that affect the quality of marriage. First, I analyze the effect of the Chilean divorce law on a woman’s decision of when to have the first child. Using survival analysis, I find that the divorce law has had a positive effect on the hazard for highly-educated women. This result suggests that highly-educated women may have waited to have the first child until they were able to afford the additional costs that a child may bring to a divorce process in case the couple decided to separate. In the second essay I analyze the relationship between domestic violence and marriage duration. Using a representative sample of Peru’s female population between 15 and 49 years old, I find that domestic violence may increase the hazard of divorce. Moreover, I find that the change in the hazard varies over time, increasing immediately after the first physical or sexual aggression from the husband, and decreasing afterwards. In the third essay I evaluate the role of domestic violence as a causal mechanism in the effect of civil conflict violence on a woman’s labor force participation. Using data on the civil conflict violence from Peru and assuming unconfoundedness, I find that the probability of working increased by 0.0454 (eight percent) for women who live in areas affected by the civil conflict and that about 27 percent of this increase is mediated by the woman’s exposure to domestic violence. Three Essays on the Quality of Marriage by Jose Victor Gallegos Muñoz B.S., Universidad del Pacifico, 2001 M.S., Syracuse University, 2008 Department of Economics DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics in the Graduate School of Syracuse University June 2012 Copyright © Jose Victor Gallegos Muñoz 2012 All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter I: The Effect of the Chilean Divorce Law on Women’s First Birth Decisions 5 Chapter II: Domestic Violence and the Duration of Marriage 58 Chapter III: The Effect of Civil Conflict on Women’s Labor Force Participation: A Causal Mechanism Approach 92 Appendices 126 Bibliography 147 IV 1 Preface The institution of marriage is a cornerstone of society. Despite having lost relevance in the last decades, the type of decisions made within a marriage still capture the attention of researchers in different disciplines. In economics, the work of Theodore W. Schultz and Gary Becker initiated modern research on marriage and the family. Following their work, economists have approached marriage by developing theoretical models and empirical work in order to improve the understanding of different aspects of marital relationships. The following essays contribute to the economics literature on marriage by examining issues that still have not been completely disentangled: the effect of divorce laws on fertility decisions, the relationship between domestic violence and marital duration, and the role of domestic violence as a causal mechanism between civil conflict violence and women’s labor force participation. In the first essay I study the effect of the Chilean divorce law on a woman’s decision of when to have the first child. The economics literature on divorce law focuses on the introduction of more flexible divorce regulation in the U.S. and has reached no consensus on the effects of divorce on fertility decisions. The introduction of absolute divorce in Chile in 2004 entails a greater change, going from a situation in which divorce is not allowed to one in which it is. Using birth histories constructed from the Social Protection Survey (Encuesta de Prevision Social – EPS) panel 2002-2009, I find that the divorce law increases the hazard of having the first child by 62 percent at all ages for highly educated women, controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, marital duration and the negative trend in fertility rates observed in Chile since the mid-1960s. The estimates also show that the response of the hazard to a one percent increase in the woman’s potential 2 income after the divorce law was passed is larger than the response of the hazard before the new law was implemented. In the second essay I examine how domestic violence affects a woman’s hazard of divorce in Peru. Psychologists have done extensive work on this topic and conclude that the relationship between marital termination and domestic violence changes over the duration of the marriage. However there is little empirical evidence as available data on domestic violence is usually not representative of a population. In this essay I use a representative sample of Peru’s female population between 15 and 49 years of age (Demographic and Health Survey 2005-2008) to construct 7,016 first-marriage spells for women who are currently in their first marriage or who were married only once before. Using these spells, I estimate a hazard model of divorce in which I take into account whether the woman experienced physical or sexual domestic aggression and when the first aggression occurred. I find that the hazard of divorce is 2.598 times the baseline hazard after the first time the woman is battered. When I allow the effect of domestic violence to change over time, the hazard of divorce is 4.3 times the baseline hazard during the first year after the woman is battered for the first time. However, between the first and sixth year the hazard of divorce decreases about 16.1 percent every year (0.851 times the baseline hazard). These estimates are obtained after controlling for marital duration, the woman’s age, parity conception during marriage, the husband’s education level and alcohol consumption habits, the woman’s potential income at the time of marriage and native language, as well as a set of dummy variables indicating the decade in which the marriage started. 3 In the third essay I investigate how domestic violence operates as a causal mechanism between civil conflict and a woman’s labor force participation. Psychologists have done most of the work on the relationship between civil violence exposure and domestic violence, while economists have focused on the causes and consequences of civil violence exposure. However, there is no evidence in the economics literature whether domestic violence may operate as a causal mechanism between civil conflict and female labor force participation. To investigate this possibility I apply the methodology developed in Flores and Flores-Lagunes (2011), which allows the identification of causal mechanisms and net effects under an unconfoundedness assumption. I use a representative sample of Peru’s female population between 15 and 49 years of age (Demographic and Health Survey 2005-2008) to construct a sample of 6,691 women. I find that the exposure to the civil conflict between 1980 and 2000 increased the probability of urban women working by 0.0454 (eight percent) and that about 27 percent of this increase is mediated by the woman’s exposure to domestic violence. This result is in line with previous investigations that show that the exposure to civil conflict violence increases the probability that a woman may become a victim of domestic violence, and that domestic violence may increase a woman’s labor force participation. Several people have contributed to the development of these essays on many ways, and it would be impossible to fully express my gratitude in a few lines. I would like to thank my parents. Their guidance and effort to provide me with the best education possible has been crucial in my life and career. I am also grateful to Paola, my wife, whose affection and support meant everything since the first day of my Ph.D. studies, and who dealt with my bad humor and who trusted me more than I did myself. Finally, I am grateful to my 4 future child, whose notice of arrival came in the best moment, and provided further inspiration in the most crucial decisions. I thank my advisor, Prof. Jan Ondrich, for the endless discussions over Skype every weekend. His advice and support during the last three years went beyond the academic needs of my dissertation and still constitute a vital source of guidance. I would also like to thank Prof. Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, for his valuable suggestions and comments, as well as Professors Susan Gensemer, Jeffrey Kubik and Derek Laing. 5 Chapter I: The Effect of the Chilean Divorce Law on Women’s First Birth Decisions Abstract The economics literature on divorce law focuses on the introduction of no-fault divorce laws in the U.S.A. and no consensus has been reached regarding its effects on divorce rates, labor force participation and fertility decisions. In 2004 Chile allowed divorce for the first time. The new divorce law established compensation in case of divorce for the spouse who gives up personal development for the good of the household. Using birth histories constructed from the Social Protection Survey (Encuesta de Prevision Social – EPS) panel 2002-2009, I investigate the effect of the divorce law on women’s age at first birth.
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