Research Spotlight: Responding to a Spouse's Lost Income

Spencer Cooper-Ohm
Additional contact information
Spencer Cooper-Ohm: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/people/cooper-ohm

Econ Focus, 2026, vol. 25, issue 1Q/2Q

Abstract: Does a spouse increase the amount they work when their spouse loses income? Finding proof of what economists call the "added worker effect" has historically been difficult. It seems intuitive that people would be incentivized to balance out their spouse's wage loss to prevent large drops in household income, but economic work to date has found little evidence that this is the case.

Keywords: household and consumer finance; employment and labor markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/ ... 2_research_spotlight Journal Article (text/html)

Related works:
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:fip:fedrrf:102426

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Econ Focus from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Pascasio ().