Toyboys or supergirls? An analysis of partners’ employment outcomes when she outearns him

Hans Bloemen () and Elena Stancanelli

Review of Economics of the Household, 2015, vol. 13, issue 3, 530 pages

Abstract: In this paper we study households in which the woman is the main earner, encompassing both dual-earners with the wife outearning the husband and couples in which the husband is not employed. The literature in this area is very scant. Earlier studies find that the wife outearns the husband in roughly one of every four dual-earner couples in North-American countries. According to our estimates, the wife earns a higher hourly wage than the husband in one of every six French households, including couples with an inactive partner, and, moreover, this proportion is almost the same considering partners’ monthly earnings. Economic models of marriage would predict that the wife’s earnings dominance be compensated by the husband being younger or possibly more attractive than the wife. Using a large dataset of couples, drawn from the French Labor Force surveys, we find that larger spousal age differences correlate positively with the occurrence of couples in which only the wife works but negatively with dual-earners in which she outearns the husband. Therefore, a marriage selection type of story may explain the occurrence of female solo-earner households while the emergence of “power couples” may provide a rationale for dual-earners in which the wife outearns the husband. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Wage inequality; Gender; Employment; J31; J16; J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11150-013-9212-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Toyboys or Supergirls? An analysis of partners' employment outcomes when she outearns him (2015)
Working Paper: Toyboys or Supergirls? An analysis of partners' employment outcomes when she outearns him (2015)
Working Paper: Toyboys or Supergirls? An analysis of partners' employment outcomes when she outearns him (2015)
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:kap:reveho:v:13:y:2015:i:3:p:501-530

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-013-9212-y

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().