Marital Disruption and the Economic Status of Women in South Korea

Abstract

Marital disruption is a constantly increasing phenomenon in South Korea. Many studies show that women usually experience the worst financial consequences out of marriage states, although there are few investigations on South Korea. The aim of this paper is to provide new evidence for Korea about the wives’ family-income changes accompanying marital splits, using data from on the 2007 wave of Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Family, using endogenous switching regression model. The results in this paper show that there is evidence of self-selection into marriage and divorce state based on unobservable factors. Hence, individuals under marriage (divorce) state have unobserved characteristics that allow them to earn more (less) than average married women. This paper provides several interesting findings; (1) the sample married wives to have 472 % under the married state (2) the sample divorced women would have a 198% increase in their family-incomes under the marriage state. This study concludes that women as a whole are indeed economically vulnerable outside of marriage.