| Divorce has been a hot topic among people due to its surprisingly rising trend for a long time, which has been aroused the curiosity of sociologists, psychologists and neurologists for decades. Economists didn’t pay attention to divorce until their expanding research territory collided with sociology. Following Becker in 1974, many economists began their own research in marriage as well as divorce. Chinese economists notices the sociological trend in economics later and the boom in social economics boomed. Being an important part of social economics, marriage has been done a lot of research among Chinese economists. By taking a quick glimpse of marriage study in China, one can see Chinese economists focus their study on finding the main influential factors by using basic cross-sectional data or panel data. Unlike normal influential factors analysis, this paper focuses on studying one key influencer to divorce, which is birthrate assuming that children will bring opportunity cost to divorce for the couple. The core idea is that when a couple consider divorce, they tend to think about the possible future for their children and their legal child raising responsibility after divorce. This will bring their opportunity cost both physically and psychologically. By this fact we assume that the rising birthrate will suppress the increase of divorce rate and vice versa. China provides an extremely perfect natural experiment for studying the relationship between divorce and birth. Unlike western country, China has a long tradition of controlling birth. This provided a perfect altered human multiplying process for research. We believe Chinese statistics will provide us a better explanation of the relationship between divorce and birth compared to western statistics. Following our assumption, this paper intends to test this assumption by using the panel data and system GMM. Fortunately, our paper find a U-shaped curve relation between divorce and birthrate. |
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