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Working Paper
What Explains the Growing Gender Education Gap? The Effects of Parental Background, the Labor Market and the Marriage Market on College Attainment
In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at the same rate, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. To understand the emerging gender education gap, we formulate and estimate a model of individual and family decision-making where education, labor supply, marriage and fertility are all endogenous. Assuming preferences that are common across ethnic groups and fixed over cohorts, our model explains differences in all endogenous variables by gender/ethnicity for the ‘60-‘80 cohorts ...
Report
Is there still an added-worker effect?
Using matched March Current Population Surveys, we examine labor market transitions of husbands and wives. We find that the ?added-worker effect??the greater propensity of nonparticipating wives to enter the labor force when their husbands exit employment?is still important among a subset of couples, but that the overall value of marriage as a risk-sharing arrangement has diminished because of the greater positive co-movement of employment within couples. While positive assortative matching on education did increase over time, this shift in the composition of couple types alone cannot account ...
Working Paper
Marriage and Work among Prime-Age Men
Married men work substantially more hours than men who have never been married, even after controlling for observables. Panel data reveal that much of this gap is attributable to an increase in work in the years leading up to marriage. Two potential explanations for this increase are: (i) men hit by positive labor market shocks are more likely to marry; and (ii) the prospect of marriage increases men's labor supply. We quantify the relative importance of these two channels using a structural life-cycle model of marriage and labor supply. Our calibration implies that marriage substantially ...
Working Paper
Why has home ownership fallen among the young?
We document that home ownership of households with "heads" aged 25 - 44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities made it easier to purchase a home. This paper uses an equilibrium life-cycle model calibrated to micro and macro evidence to understand why young home ownership fell over a period when it became easier to own a home. Our findings indicate that a trend toward marrying later and the increase in household earnings risk ...
Working Paper
Marriage and Work Among Prime-Age Men
Married men work substantially more hours than men who have never been married, even after controlling for observables. Panel data reveal that much of this gap is attributable to an increase in work in the years leading up to marriage. Two potential explanations for this increase are: (i) men hit by positive labor market shocks are more likely to marry; and (ii) the prospect of marriage increases men’s labor supply. We quantify the relative importance of these two channels using a structural life-cycle model of marriage and labor supply. Our calibration implies that marriage substantially ...
Report
Educational assortative mating and household income inequality
We document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. Our analysis focuses on the United States but also uses data from Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels of education in each country. However, the time trends vary by the level of education: Among college graduates, assortative mating has been declining over time, whereas individuals with a low level of education are increasingly sorting into internally homogeneous marriages. These ...
Journal Article
Research Spotlight: Marriage is Extra Work
An immense literature in economics is devoted to studying the labor supply of women and determining whether their supply differs by marital status or the presence of children. This literature has found, not surprisingly, that married women tend to have a lower supply of labor compared to women who have never been married. But there has been substantially less research on the relationship of marital status and labor supply for men. It turns out there is also a gap in annual hours worked between married men and men who have never been married, with married men working substantially more. ...
Journal Article
Pink and Poverty Taxes on Marriage
A "pink tax" is the extra cost charged for goods and services esigned for women. In this research, we expand the scope of this pink tax by examining gender and income differentials in marriage taxes. A marriage tax reflects the decline in spending power as a result of the difference in taxes and transfer benefits that arise from marriage. We use a lifetime measure of the marriage tax and show that low-income females with children are penalized the most, with a loss of 3.35 percent of their lifetime resources because of marriage. This marriage tax also makes a significant difference to their ...
Report
Human capital investments and expectations about career and family
This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at all, would affect a wide array of future events, including future earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility. We find that students perceive large ?returns" to human capital not only in their own future earnings, but also in a number of other dimensions ...
Journal Article
Chances aren't
While we tend to think of whom and when we marry as an individual decision, social and economic forces play a major role.