'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, 2017, vol. 107, issue 11, 3288-3319

Abstract: Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (on exams and problem sets), unmarried women have lower participation grades. In a field experiment, single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real-stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences. Other groups' responses were unaffected by peer observability. A second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers.

JEL-codes: C93 D82 J12 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20170029
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (79)

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