Re-marry, re-cohabit or reconcile? How demographic and socio-economic factors are related to the different exits from lone motherhood.

A clear preference for repartnering in the form of a cohabiting rather than a marital union has been noted by studies examining repartnering of lone parents (Böheim and Ermisch, 1998) as well as repartnering of all individuals (Ermisch and Francesconi, 2000; Wu and Schimmele, 2005; Skew, Evans and Gray, 2009). However, what is unknown for lone mothers, is how the effects of explanatory covariates may differ depending on the type of new partnership a lone mother enters. Moreover, the issue of reforming a prior union rather than forming a new partnership has rarely been addressed in any of the repartnering literature. This paper uses data collected by the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the years 1991-2008 and employs discrete-time multinomial logistic hazard models to simultaneously model entry into a) marriage and cohabitation, and b) reconciling and finding a new partner, for women that enter lone motherhood through the dissolution of a union.