Abstract

Marital separation, especially when dependent children are involved, is a significant and disruptive event that often involves considerable changes in living standards. This article uses a newly available dataset to provide, for the first time, estimates of the short- to medium-term economic impacts of marital separation for parents of dependent-aged children in New Zealand. Unlike most similar studies, which are based on relatively small samples of separating individuals drawn from panel surveys, we exploit a large database of longitudinal tax and welfare records. This allows us to examine the economic consequences of separation for approximately 16,000 New Zealand parents and carers of dependent-aged children who separated in a 12-month period. The analysis applies propensity score matching, combined with difference-in-differences estimation, to estimate impacts. We find an average 29 per cent first-year decline in equivalised incomes for separating women and a 15 per cent average rise for men. In both cases, the effects persist to the end of the study period three years after separation. Our results also show a significant rise in poverty rates for both men and women, relatively small changes in employment and earnings, and a large increase in welfare receipts among the women.

中文翻译：

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新西兰父母分居的经济后果：来自大型行政数据集的见解

摘要

婚姻分离，特别是涉及抚养子女的婚姻分离，是一个重大的破坏性事件，通常涉及生活水平的重大变化。本文使用了一个新的可用数据集，首次提供了婚姻分离对新西兰受抚养年龄的孩子的父母的短期到中期经济影响的估计。与大多数类似的研究不同，这些研究基于从小组调查中抽取的相对较小的个体样本，我们利用纵向税收和福利记录的大型数据库。这使我们可以检查大约12 000个月内分居的大约16,000名新西兰父母和抚养年龄的孩子的照顾的经济后果。该分析应用了倾向得分匹配，并结合了差异差异估算，估计影响。我们发现，女性离职的第一年平均收入平均下降了29％，男性平均增长了15％。在这两种情况下，效果一直持续到分离后三年的研究期结束。我们的结果还表明，男性和女性的贫困率均显着上升，就业和收入的变化相对较小，女性的福利收入大幅增加。