Pierre André Chiappori (Columbia) "Family Economics" - Cemmap

11
Marriage,Divorce,Children
11.1 Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to examine in more detail the role of children
in marriage and divorce. 1 In particular, we wish to discuss the determination
of expenditures on children and their welfare under various living
arrangements, with and without the intervention of the courts. There is a
growing concern that the higher turnover in the marriage market causes
more children to live with single mothers or step parents. In the US, year
2005, 68 percent of children less than 18 years old lived with two parents
(including step parents), 23 percent lived only with their mother, 5 percent
lived only with their father and the rest lived in households with neither
parent present. This may be harmful to the children. 2 Part of the problem
is that, following separation, fathers are less willing to transfer resources
to the custodial mothers (that is, their ex-wives). A major objective of our
analysis is to explain how transfers between separated parents are determined
and how they vary with marriage market conditions.
Separation may entail an inefficient level of expenditures on children for
several reasons: 1) If the parents remarry, the presence of a new spouse who
cares less about step children reduces the incentives to spend on children
from previous marriages. 2) If the parents remain single then, in addition to
the loss of the gains from joint consumption, the custodial parent may determine
child expenditures without regard to the interest of their ex-spouse.
3) Parents that live apart from their children can contribute less time and
goods to their children and may derive less satisfaction from them. These
1 This chapter extends the results reported in Chiappori and Weiss (2007) to include
both time and money as inputs to the child welfare. See also Weiss and Willis (1985,
1993), Del-Boca (2003), and Case et al (2003).
2 There is substantial evidence that children of divorced parents do not perform as
well as comparable children in intact families. See Argys et al.(1998), Lamb et al.(1999),
Hetherington and Stanley-Hagan (1999), Gruber (2004) and Stafford and Yeung (2005).
Such empirical evidence should be interpreted with some care, for two reasons. First,
dysfunctional families are more likely to generate both divorce and poor child performance.
B´jorklund and Sundstrom (2006) argue that inferior performances of divorced
children can largely be attributed to selection effects. Second, even if divorce causes
poor performance at the individual level, the impact of the aggregate divorce rate on
the welfare of children is a different issue. As shown by Piketty (2003) the increase in
the divorce rate in France has reduced the gap in school performance between children
of divorced parents and children from intact families.
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