Moving to Opportunity, Together

Seema Jayachandran, Lea Nassal, Matthew Notowidigdo, Marie Paul, Heather Sarsons and Elin Sundberg

No 32970, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. We first conduct an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff events, we then find that couples in both countries are more likely to relocate in response to the man being laid off compared to the woman. We investigate whether these gendered patterns reflect men’s higher potential earnings or a gender norm that prioritizes men’s career advancement. We provide suggestive evidence of a gender norm using variation in norms within Germany. We then develop and estimate a model of household decision-making in which households can place more weight on the income earned by the man compared to the woman. In both countries, the estimated model can accurately reproduce the reduced-form results, including those not used to estimate the model. The results point to a role for gender norms in explaining the gender gap in the returns to joint moves.

JEL-codes: J16 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: LS
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