Two Essays on Divorce and One on Utilitarianism.

Abstract

This dissertation’s second and third chapters are about divorce. The fourth is about utilitarianism. Each can be read as a self-contained paper. The second chapter is titled “The Evolution of Fault to No-Fault Divorce and The Contemporaneous Changes in Divorce Rates.” I find that the statutory enactment of no-fault was not correlated with an increase in divorce rates. Instead, it was correlated with a fall in the growth rates of divorce. I review the historical facts and find that in the previous decades, the fault concept had already been thoroughly eroded. This may explain why no-fault reforms were not correlated with an increase in divorce. The third chapter is titled “Omnibus Clauses and Contemporaneous Changes in Divorce Rates, 1867-1906.” I give a primer on the unusually liberal divorce laws known as omnibus clauses. I find that they were significantly correlated with divorce rates. The fourth chapter is titled “Revealed Relative Utilitarianism.” It considers the aggregation of von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences and introduces the concept of revealed marginal rates of substitution. The main result is that the only social welfare function that satisfies a certain set of axioms that is the relative utilitarian welfare function, that is, where the social planner simply adds up all agents’ 0-1 normalized utility functions.