This model explores a social mechanism that links the reversal of the gender gap in education with changes in relative divorce risks.

Over the last decades, women’s average educational attainment has increased faster than men’s in many Western countries. As a consequence, today there are more highly educated women than men on the marriage market and the share of marriages in which the wife is more educated than the husband has increased. In the past, marriages in which the wife was more educated than the husband were more likely to end in divorce than marriages in which the husband was more educated, but this difference does not exist anymore in recent US marriage cohorts.

The model makes it possible to explore whether changes in relative divorce risks might result from changes in the availability of attractive marital alternatives for highly educated men and women, which were induced by the reversal of the gender gap in education. The model draws on empirical data that allow users to study this mechanism in 12 European countries.