This continuation proposal requests three years of additional support to complete an empirical analysis of divorce settlements using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS'72). The current empirical project builds on a theoretical model of marriage and divorce which served as the conceptual basis for the design of a questionnaire module for the Fifty Follow-Up of the NLS'72. This data set contains unusually rich economic and demographic information on marriage and cohabitation, fertility, divorce settlements and the aftermath of divorce with a sufficiently large sample size to permit detailed analysis of relatively rare events (e.g., divorce) and particular subgroups (e.g., blacks). Dynamic questions can be addressed by combining longitudinal data from the five waves and retrospective data within each wave (especially within the Fifth Follow-Up) to construct a variety of event histories. The specific goals of this project include testing of theoretically derived hypotheses concerning the following aspects of marital instability and divorce: (1) determinants of several components of divorce settlements including property division, child support, child custody and visitation; (2) relationship between divorce settlements and the probability (or hazard) of divorce including the joint effects of unexpected variations in the economic situation of the husband and wife and marital stability and on divorce settlements; (3) determinants of compliance with the terms of a divorce settlement with particular emphasis on child support, custody and visitation; (4) effects of divorce and divorce settlements on the welfare of the divorcing couple and their children including consideration of the effects of remarriage. In addition, preliminary analysis of the data suggests that important and fascinating questions concerning the role of cohabitation and black-white differences in marriage, childbearing and child support deserve to be analyzed. Therefore, the theory will be extended to deal with the choice between cohabitation and formal marriage and the choice of marital versus non-marital childbearing. Hypotheses suggested by the extended theory will be used to broaden the scope of the empirical analysis to include the determinants of marriage as well as divorce and to attempt to explain the causes and consequences of dramatic differences in these behaviors between blacks and whites.
