Unemployment and Marital Breakdown: The Spanish Case

This paper explores the relationship between a job loss and marital breakdown using Spanish panel data. The Great Recession in Spain has had severe consequences, representing an interesting framework to analyse the relationship between job loss and marital breakdown. Not only do we study whether being unemployed is associated with marital breakdown but, also, we examine the effect of job losses. In contrast with other papers examining this issue for other countries, results reveal that in Spain it is the working status of women which plays a role in the marital break-up decision. Results suggest that the probability of marital breakdown decreases when women are non-working. The same is observed when we consider a change in the working status of women from employed to unemployed and from employed to inactive. For men, only the change from employed to inactive appears to be negatively related to the probability of marital breakdown.