Svarer, Michael. 2004. "Is Your Love in Vain? Another Look at Premarital Cohabitation and Divorce." Journal of Human Resources 39(2): 523-535.

In this paper we provide an empirical investigation of the association between premarital cohabitation and subsequent risk of divorce. Theoretically couples who cohabit before marriage should have a lower subsequent risk of divorce since cohabitation enables you to gather information about the match quality, and only good matches evolve into marriage. However, a considerable number of papers have come to the complete opposite conclusion. The counter-intuitive result has been justified with self-selection of cohabitants as the main argument. In the present paper, we provide new evidence concerning the relationship between premarital cohabitation and divorce.

Michael Svarer is an associate professor of economics at the University of Aarhus. He gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Danish Social Science Research Council, Centre for Labour Market and Social Research, Centre for Research in Social Integration and Marginalization, and National Centre for Register-based Research. This paper has benefited from the comments of Gerard van den Berg, Per-Anders Edin, Niels Haldrup, Peter Jensen, Michael Rosholm, Marianne Simonsen, Lars Skipper, Mette Verner, Daniela Vuri, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of Aarhus, Aarhus School of Business, Centre for Applied Microeconometrics, and Copenhagen Business School, and participants at the Spring Meeting for Young Economists 2001, Nordic Econometric Meeting 2001, and Econometric Society Winter Meeting 2002. The author thanks Søren Leth-Sørensen for providing the data, Jens Chr. Thellesen for excellent research assistance, and Gerda Christophersen and Karin Lund Kusk for carefully reading the manuscript. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2004 through September 2007 from Michael Svarer, Department of Economics, University of Aarhus, Building 350, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark, email: michael@svarer.dk.