The Employment of Separated Women in Europe: Individual and Institutional Determinants Maike van Damme, Matthijs Kalmijn and Wilfred Uunk Studies on the economic consequences of divorce for women have paid little attention to changes in employment. In this article, we investigate changes in employment for separating women and the impact of individual and institutional factors on these changes using data on 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001). Our dynamic analyses of the odds of employment entry and exit, and changes in working hours demonstrate that European women only modestly increase employment after separation, although in some countries this change is larger than in others. Important individual-level determinants of employment changes are education and labour market experience (positive effects), health (positive effect), and the presence of young children (negative effect). Institutional factors have opposing influences: more generous public childcare provisions encourage the employment of separated women, whereas more generous allowances for single parents discourage employment. The results underline the importance of distinguishing between income- and employment-related institutions in studying outcomes of union dissolution. Introduction In the past decades, many studies have examined the effect of divorce on women’s income. Studies have shown that the majority of women experience a large income-drop after separation (Holden and Smock, 1991; Poortman, 2000; Uunk, 2004; Andreß et al., 2006). The income loss can be up to 50 per cent, depending on how income is measured (Poortman, 2000). Important determinants of income decline are loss of economies of scale, lack of women’s human capital investments, and the presence of children after divorce. Institutional arrangements like welfare benefits and childcare provi- sions mitigate the negative income consequences for women (Uunk, 2004). Divorce is also found to increase poverty rates (Duncan and Hoffman, 1985; Finnie, 1993; Dewilde, 2002) and welfare dependency among women (Poortman and Fokkema, 2001). Although employment reduces the negative financial consequences of divorce (Poortman and Fokkema, 2001; Bouman, 2005), in the literature on the economic consequences of divorce, little attention is paid to changes in women’s employment. Studies by Mueller (2005), Bouman (2005), Bradbury and Katz (2002), Duncan and Hoffman (1985), Finnie (1993), Haurin (1989), and Jenkins (2008) described changes in labour supply after divorce using longitudinal data, yet did not examine in detail which factors explain these changes. Two older studies from the US by Johnson and Skinner (1986) and Peterson (1989) tried to explain employment changes by age, human capital, and the presence of children, but they hardly found significant effects. A more recent study by Covizzi (2008) for Switzerland used longitudinal data to look into the odds of unemployment after divorce but did not address other employment changes. European Sociological Review VOLUME 25 NUMBER 2 2009 183–197 183 DOI:10.1093/esr/jcn042, available online at www.esr.oxfordjournals.org Online publication 8 August 2008 ß The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org