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Title: Estimating the Impact of Marriage on Women's Wages
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Killewald, Alexandra
Gough, Margaret
Estimating the Impact of Marriage on Women's Wages
Presented: Dallas, TX, Population Association of America Meetings, April 2010
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Coresidence; Cost-Benefit Studies; Gender; Gender Attitudes/Roles; Gender Differences; Income; Income Distribution; Marriage; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Sex Equality; Unions; Wage Gap; Wages; Wives, Work; Women's Roles

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The costs and benefits of marriage for women are influenced in part by the effect of marriage on women's earnings potential, yet the wage premium or penalty for married women has been relatively ignored. The theory of within-household specialization predicts that women's wages will fall upon entry into coresidential unions as their time in household labor rises and their labor market effort falls. If this is the case, marriage contributes to sex stratification by exacerbating the gender gap in pay and reducing wives' bargaining power within the household. We use data from the NLSY79 and fixed-effects models to assess the marriage premium or penalty for women. In contrast to the specialization model, we find that women have higher wages in the years after their entry into marriage, suggesting that marriage need not be a zero-sum game between spouses in terms of their labor market rewards.
Bibliography Citation
Killewald, Alexandra and Margaret Gough. "Estimating the Impact of Marriage on Women's Wages." Presented: Dallas, TX, Population Association of America Meetings, April 2010.