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Title: How Do Married Men Get Ahead? A Process-Based Examination of the Male Marriage Premium
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Killewald, Alexandra
Lundberg, Ian
How Do Married Men Get Ahead? A Process-Based Examination of the Male Marriage Premium
Presented: Boston MA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, May 2014
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Employment History; Husbands; Marriage; Work Experience; Work Hours/Schedule

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

The wage premium for married men is well-documented. Prior research has concentrated on understanding why this might be so, focusing on the role of household specialization. Largely absent from this research is attention to the job processes by which married men realize wage gains. We propose three possible pathways: (1) increased work experience, (2) improved employment histories, including longer job tenure and better job match, and (3) moves to higher-paying job types. We find that each of these processes contributes to the male marriage premium, although work experience is the most important. We further find that increases in work experience benefit married men about equally, regardless of wives’ labor supply, casting doubt on a pure specialization explanation. Lastly, we demonstrate the importance of flexibly specifying mediating variables: Conventional measures of work experience substantially understate the share of the marriage premium attributable to changes in work hours.
Bibliography Citation
Killewald, Alexandra and Ian Lundberg. "How Do Married Men Get Ahead? A Process-Based Examination of the Male Marriage Premium." Presented: Boston MA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, May 2014.