The impact of unilateral divorce law on murder

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of a law that enables the dissolution of marriage without mutual consent of both spouses on the rates of murder in United States. The analysis exploits the fact that states passed the law at different points in time. The variability across time and space in the implementation of the law offers a potential instrument in order to identify the causal effect of unilateral divorce law on murder rate. After controlling for state and year fixed effects, I find that the states which passed the law experienced an increase of 16 percent in murder rates.