Making divorce easier: the role of no-fault and unilateral revisited

摘要

Currently, the divorce literature has mainly focused on the introduction of no-fault and unilateral divorce grounds to explain the positive relation between 'making divorce easier' and divorce rates. We use the case study of Belgium to demonstrate that both no-fault and unilateral might not be the ideal proxies for 'making divorce easier', because the procedural level of legislation is entirely disregarded. Therefore, we propose an alternative proxy which does manage to capture the time-varying legislative environment, namely the duration of the legal divorce process. We find that a reduction in the duration of the divorce process by a month increases the divorce trend with about 1.4 %.