Marriage, Specialization, and the Gender Division of LaborMatthew Baker () and Joyce Jacobsen () No 2005-001, Wesleyan Economics Working Papers from Wesleyan University, Department of Economics Abstract: A customary gender division of labor is one in which women and men are directed towards certain tasks and/or explicitly prohibited from performing others. We offer an explanation as to why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom, and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. Our model builds on the literature on the marital hold-up problem, and considers both problems in choice of specialty and human capital acquisition in a framework in which agents learn a variety of skills and then enter the marriage market. We show that wasteful behavior may emerge due to strategic incentives in career choice and human capital acquisition, and that both problems may be mitigated through the customary gender division of labor. We find, however, that a gender division of labor is not Pareto-improving; one gender is made worse off. Both the distributional effects and welfare gains of a customary gender division of labor decrease as opportunities to exchange in markets increase. Keywords: earnings inequality; income inequality; gender; race; and ethnicity differences (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Journal of Labor Economics, October 2007, 25 (4): 763-793 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Wesleyan Economics Working Papers from Wesleyan University, Department of Economics |
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