Health and Outcomes of Divorced Individuals: The Role of Resources

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Divorced individuals have worse health than married individuals, a trend that can persist over the life course. Although both partners experience the acute stress of the divorce process, differential gender patterns emerge in longer-term health outcomes. Post-divorce, men’s decline in health is attributed to a reduction in self-care, such as eating unhealthily, reducing exercise, and going to the doctor less; Women’s decline in health is attributed to permanently reduced economic circumstances. But there is reason to think that, in the future, these classic gender interpretations may not apply to the same degree due to a changing demographic and economic context. Individuals marry at later ages and the relative economic status of men and women (inside and outside of marriage) has grown much closer. If the economic costs to divorce are more evenly shared than in the past, then the expected health effects of divorce may change as well for both men and women. But virtually all prior work is based on correlation, and the demographic and economic changes are endogenous, leaving little to predict how health may change with changes in post- divorce financial resources. Yet, there is a third changing context to divorce, one that allows for causal identification. The family law statutes determining property allocation and alimony arrangements—the post- divorce financial resources individuals have rights to—also evolved over this time period. Critically, these statutes have varied across states and within states over time, providing exogenous state-by-year variation in post-divorce financial resources. This investigation uses that variation—a novel source of identification that we are the first to apply—to causally identify the relationship between post-divorce resources and health. We use the Health and Retirement Study for our analysis. For divorces observed while in the HRS, we can use family law to instrument for post-divorce wealth and income, and regress health on predicted wealth and income. For all divorces, including those that occurred prior to the HRS observation, we can regress health directly on family law measures. Both are exogenous, the former estimates the causal effect of resources on divorcee health, the latter estimates the causal effect of family law regime on divorcee health, staying agnostic of mechanism. Given the demographic and economic changes that occurred over the same period and given that the effect of family law on resources varies among divorcees—for some it could be fundamental, for others marginal—we identify key demographic and economic subgroups. We map these subgroups over time and cohorts using the HRS and the Survey of Income and Program Participation Synthetic Beta (SSB) and stratify our regression results by those groups. This allows us to compare the health effects across key groups and show if those groups are rising or falling as a share of the divorced population. To support future researchers, we will publish the code, methodology, and guide to our family law dataset, extending the impact of the novel identification strategy that we develop.