Divorce and Education in Croatia: Evidence of a Changing Relationship from a Couples’ Perspective

Petra Medimurec, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Demography
Ivan Cipin, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Economics and Business

This paper adds to a broad literature on educational differentials in divorce by examining data from Croatia. Our contribution to previous research is manifold. First, we investigate divorce from a couples’ perspective and include both husbands’ and wives’ characteristics into our analyses. Existing studies are often limited to female education only, and hence fail to account for marriage partners’ joint status. Second, we test whether the relationship between education and divorce varies across marriage cohorts. In many countries, marriages are becoming increasingly stable for highly educated spouses. However, studies that empirically evaluate temporal patterns in divorce by spouses’ relative education are scarce and mostly refer to the US. Third, our data link individual vital statistics records on marriage and divorce from 1989 to 2014. Similar data have rarely been used to study divorce in European countries. These data conveniently allow us to estimate the effects of education on divorce during a period of marked improvements in female education, which are reflected also in a growing share of hypogamous marriages and a diminishing share of hypergamous marriages. We restrict our analyses to first marriages (n > 500,000) and control for a limited set of additional variables. These include calendar time, as Croatia underwent profound social and economic change over the years considered. Using event history methods, we find a large shift in the influence of women’s education on divorce – the once positive gradient has eventually turned negative. For men, the negative influence of education on divorce has widened over time. Couples in which husbands hold less education than their wives appear to be more likely to divorce relative to other couples, but our results suggest that this association has weakened or even reversed among newer marriage cohorts.

Presented in Session 13: Socioeconomic Differentials in Union Dissolution