DIVORCE-INDUCED HEALTH DECLINE AND IMPACT ON MORTALITY RISK

Kar Man Tan , Federal Institute for Population Research
Pavel Grigoriev, Federal Institute for Population Research

Divorce has long been linked to elevated mortality, however, the causal mechanisms underlying this relationship is complex and remain insufficiently identified. Health is an important factor which may distort the relationship between divorce and mortality. Germany offers an ideal setting to examine the link between divorce, health and death: extensive pension-registry microdata combines life histories, detailed divorce measures, sickness-leave records and mortality. In our paper, we use propensity score matching to generate three controls for each divorced individual. We implement three matching specifications, 1) using only pre-divorce sociodemographic and rehabilitation related variables to capture life biographies and pre-divorce health, 2) additionally predicting rehabilitation risk two years after the divorce year and 3) additionally predicting mortality risk five years after the divorce year. The second and third specifications generate rehabilitation and death prognostics which allow us to account for changes in health and mortaliy outcomes unrelated to divorce itself. We calculated the weighted ATT for rehabilitation incidence, duration, time to first rehabilitation and time to death. Preliminary results show a small positive effect of divorce on cumulative rehabilitation incidences and annual rehabilitation duration. Divorce also increases the delay in the first rehabilitation after the divorce year while it decreases the time to death. Using the second and third specifications lessen the effect of divorce on annual rehabilitation duration and time to death, but increases the delay to first rehabilitation. The next step is for us to use mediation models to decompose the direct and indirect pathways to death from divorce.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 118. Flash Session Families, Partnerships and Health