Divorce and spouses' socio-economic resources

Lithuania is one of the EU countries with very high divorce rates that are almost stable for more than three decades. Nevertheless, the underlying social factors of this pronounced demographic trend remain understudied. The aim of this article is to identify the effect of husbands and wives' educational and economic resources on the stability of marriage. The study is based on the analysis of the census-linked dataset and thus covers the total first-time married population of Lithuania. The research results prove that low socio-economic resources are associated with higher divorce risk for the male subpopulation in Lithuania: low education and out of employment status alleviate the divorce risk. In the female subpopulation the effect of educational attainment has the same direction as in the male subpopulation but employment status has an opposite direction effect.