Economics of Divorce

The incidence of divorce is exhibiting a rising trend in every country. This phenomenon poses serious multi-dimensional challenges to two types of institutions-legal and socio-cultural. In the event of divorce, child is considered as the worst victim. So it becomes a responsibility of the legal institution to allocate child custody and arrange for a child support payment from the non-custodian parent with the objective of maintaining child's welfare. Unfortunately, several experiments in this regard have failed to achieve the objective either in part or in full. This book has a chapter to show theoretically that a combinatorial mechanism implemented by the court and the government can allocate child custody efficiently and eliminates the need for any child support system. The book also devotes a chapter to provide some direction to the age old anti-feminist debate whether women emancipation is at the root of shrinking family size manifested through disintegration of joint families to nuclear families and further culminating to single parenthood through divorce. We are optimistic that the results derived here have implications for policymakers, lawmakers and empirical researchers.