The Powerball jackpot is estimated at $635 million for Wednesday night’s drawing, with a cash option of about $267.5 million, CBS12 reported. A study of Swedish lottery players looked at what a big win does to people’s relationships, and the answer was different for men and women.
The study, “Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility,” was published in the Journal of Human Resources by economists David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and Anastasia Terskaya, PsyPost reported. It found that winning money made single men more likely to get married, while married women who won were more likely to get divorced in the first two years.
Who Was in the Study
The researchers looked at 76,859 people who played one of three Swedish lotteries: a monthly subscription lottery, a scratch-ticket lottery, and savings accounts that enter holders into prize draws. They matched the players to Swedish government records and followed what happened to them two, five and 10 years after a win.
Everyone was between 18 and 44 when they won. The results are measured per 1 million Swedish kronor after tax, which PsyPost put at about $140,000 in 2010 terms, or more than five times a typical Swede’s yearly disposable income.
What Changed for Men
Single men who won were more likely to marry. Their chance of getting married within five years went up by 4.7 percentage points from a starting point of about 16%, an increase of roughly 30%. Most of that came from men who had earned less than the median before their win.
Male winners also had more children. Ten years after a win, they had 14% more kids per 1 million kronor. The authors estimate that 20% to 40% of that increase came from more marriages and fewer divorces.
The study also found that money may have lowered men’s risk of divorce, but that was its weakest result.
What Changed for Women
For single women, a win made little difference in whether they got married. The effect was small and not statistically significant.
Among married women, divorce went up. Their risk of divorce within two years of a win rose by almost 4 percentage points from a 4% baseline, nearly doubling it. As with the men, the effect was concentrated among women who had below-median incomes before the win.
It didn’t last. By the 10-year mark, the effect had faded. “The divorce effect for women is sharp and short-lived,” Terskaya said, according to PsyPost.
The Study’s Limits
All of the data come from Sweden, a high-income country with a strong welfare system, so the results may not carry over to the U.S. The differences between men and women were not statistically confirmed. The data also didn’t measure relationship quality, so the reasons behind the effects remain unclear.
Jeong Jin Yu, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China who was not involved in the research, told PsyPost, “Confidence is relatively high in the main findings because the study uses a large administrative dataset.” He also warned against reading too much into it. “Readers should not conclude that money automatically causes marriage, children, or divorce,” he said.
