Analysis of short-term and long-term economic variables on marriage and divorce trend with an emphasis on sexual and educational control channels

Marriage and divorce can be related to economic, sexual and institutional issues that make it easier or more difficult to create or maintain a new married life. In this study, the impact of economic variables on smooth and stochastic trends of marriage and divorce, with emphasis on sexual ratio and literacy rate control channels has been analyzed during 1969-2016 in Iran, using Autoregressive Distributed Lag model and Kalman filter. The results show that there is a significant and positive relationship between smooth divorce process and economic variables. Importantly, sexual ratio and literacy rate control channels are the channels that allow for accurate interpretations of unemployment and inflation on the smooth divorce process. In addition, sexual ratio and literacy rate have a positive and significant effect on the smooth marriage process. Therefore, the emphasis on gender-based alerting mechanism and literacy rate planning can have a double and synergic effect on improving the marriage process in Iran. Therefore, family formation in Iran is particularly influenced by gender control channels (especially sexual ratio) and institutional control channels (especially literacy rates) but the decision to divorce can be influenced by inflation and unemployment in addition to gender and institutional variables.