The 1970s divorce boom might have been caused by a sudden surplus of young women rather than a shift in morals.
SSRN · March 17, 2026 · 6428975
The Takeaway
While we usually credit the sexual revolution for rising divorce rates, this paper suggests it was a simple supply-and-demand problem. As millions of young women entered the marriage market, older men suddenly had so many remarriage prospects that the incentive to leave their wives became mathematically irresistible.
From the abstract
The United States experienced two major demographic ’booms’ during the second half of the twentieth century, in births after 1945 and in divorces 25 years later. This paper argues that the two booms are linked. As the baby-boomers were entering marriageable age, men in previous cohorts were faced with exceptionally good remarriage prospects. I show that across states marriages in the pre-boom generations were more likely to divorce the bigger the relative supply of young women (instrumenting the