The Changing Identities of American Wives and Mothers

Jeanne Lafortune, Laura Salisbury and Aloysius Siow

Journal of Economic Literature, 2024, vol. 62, issue 4, 1538-88

Abstract: Over the last century, resource allocations within families changed significantly, as did marriage matching patterns. College-educated women became more likely to marry (and, to a lesser extent, have children) than less educated women. A large literature documents these patterns and proposes a variety of explanations. We review this literature. Then, we provide a unified empirical framework, which can integrate these mechanisms. We demonstrate the usefulness of that framework by employing it in decennial US censuses and showing that a combination of technological changes that increased the value of children's education and enabled more educated women to devote more time to child-rearing are consistent with multiple behavioral changes within marriage, on the marriage market, and before marriage.

JEL-codes: I20 J12 J13 J16 N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1257/jel.20231648

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