Coal and family through the boom and bust: A look at the coal Industry's impact on marriage and divorce

Abstract Rural America has a long relationship with the coal industry. Long-term shifts toward less labor intensive practices in the industry, coupled with policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions have resulted in substantial employment losses in coal communities. While the economic impacts of declining industries in rural America have been documented, less work has been done to investigate the impact of coal employment losses on social outcomes. We address this gap in the literature by assessing the association between county-level measures of coal employment and marriage, divorce, and cohabitation in nonmetro America. We use a novel proprietary data set to isolate the relationship between marital outcome and coal mining from all other types of mining that aggregated in publicly available data sets. Additionally, we compare these relationships across boom and bust periods. We find that after controlling for total employment growth, the presence of coal mining in a county is significantly associated with marital outcomes and these relationships differ across nonmetro and metro areas. We find some evidence that rural areas that typically have more experience with extraction industries display greater resilience to both positive and negative coal industry shocks compared to metropolitan counties.