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.