Divorce: What does learning have to do with it?

• What is the role of learning vs. shocks to marriage quality in explaining divorce?
• I develop four theoretical models of divorce, three of which include learning.
• I test these models using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation.
• The data does not support models with a substantial amount of learning.
• Shocks to marriage quality can best account for the divorce patterns in the data.

Learning about marriage quality has been proposed as a key mechanism for explaining how the probability of divorce evolves with marriage duration, and why people often cohabit before getting married. I develop four theoretical models of divorce, three of which include learning. I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to test reduced form implications of these models. The data is inconsistent with models including a substantial amount of learning. On the other hand, the data is consistent with a model without any learning, but where marriage quality changes over time.