Divorce risks of Swedish women in first marriages: two cohorts born in 1950 and 1960

Abstract

In this paper, we study first-marriage divorce risks in two cohorts of Swedish women, namely, those born in 1950 and 1960. We develop a hazard model with a piecewise-linear baseline log-hazard. First, we run the model without unobserved heterogeneity and second, we run the model with such a term. We have found a divorce pattern for Swedish women similar to what other researchers have found. Facilitated by having both cohort data and efficient software (aML), we were able to get a clear picture of the timing pattern of first marital dissolution risks. Our 1950 cohort model without unobserved heterogeneity does not produce any biased results; our 1960 cohort model with no unobserved heterogeneity overestimates the baseline hazard and evidently underestimates some of the coefficients.Sweden, cohorts, divorce