The Second Paycheck to Keep Up With the Joneses: Relative Income Concerns and Labor Market Decisions of Married Women

Yongjin Park ()

UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates whether one’s effort to keep up with the Joneses has any effect on labor supply behavior. We provide a simple model and empirical evidence that labor supply decisions of married women are influenced by relative as well as absolute income of their husbands. We find, after controlling for husbands’ absolute income and other individual characteristics, that married women are more likely to be in labor force when their husbands’ relative income is low. Results are robust across various settings and measures of relative income and the size of the effect is economically meaningful. We also show that income inequality of reference group of husbands in age-regional cross sections can be a predictor of their wives’ labor supply.

Keywords: Interdependent utility; relative income; social comparisons; inequality; emulation; labor market participation of married women. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D62 H23 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.umass.edu/economics/publications/2005-10.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: The Second Paycheck to Keep Up with the Joneses: Relative Income Concerns and Labor Market Decisions of Married Women (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ums:papers:2005-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniele Girardi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).