Alimony and marital commitment: the unintended consequences of alimony reform on assortative matching

Abstract Recent literature indicates that divorce law changes which reduce commitment or income-sharing upon separation will lead to an increase in assortative matching and reduce household specialization which may not be compensated upon divorce. Using state-level data on alimony reform that reduced the entitlements of eligible spouses and American Community Survey data on the characteristics of newlyweds, we find that alimony reform that limits alimony increases measures of spousal correlation in educational attainment and regression-based measures of assortative matching, with the largest effects among those groups who might be more sensitive to the reform. Our results indicate that alimony reform may increase inter-household income inequality by increasing the covariance of spousal earnings.