Parental divorce and offspring marriage in Finland: later, but with whom?

Abstract

Despite the large literature on the long-term effects of parental divorce, few studies have analyzed the effects of parental divorce on spouse selection behavior. We use register-based event-history data from Finland to study the effects of parental divorce on spouse selection according to education with conditional multinomial logistic regression (CMLR) models. The results show that Finnish children of divorce postpone their marriages. They have a lower likelihood of marrying spouses with higher secondary education or more, but given this constraint, they have a higher likelihood of marrying people with higher levels of education than themselves. The results suggest that children of divorce are less preferred spouse candidates, but nonetheless prefer marrying better educated spouses than themselves.