Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
8-2026
Abstract
We study what predicts marital instability using a unique dataset from Japan with detailed measures of spouses’ consumption, savings, labor supply, satisfaction, and marriage-market conditions. We combine descriptive survival and event-study analyses with several econometric and machine-learning approaches, including Cox proportional-hazards models and DynForest, a method designed for survival data with time-varying covariates. Across these approaches, match quality, household resources, time use, stated satisfaction, and marriage-market conditions all contain predictive information. Our main contribution is to show that intrahousehold consumption allocation matters, highlighting information that is missed by standard demographic, time use, and income measures. We relate these findings to the theoretical literature on the drivers of divorce.
Keywords
Divorce, Marital Stability, Intra-household Allocation, DynForest
Discipline
Family, Life Course, and Society
First Page
1
Last Page
61
Publisher
Singapore Management University
Citation
FUJII, Tomoki; LIN, Xirong; and PENGLASE, Jacob.
Marital stability and intrahousehold inequality. (2026). 1-61.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2893
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.