Marriage and Money: Variations across the Earnings Distribution

Mark Western () and Belinda Hewitt
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Mark Western: The University of Queensland
Belinda Hewitt: The University of Queensland

Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), 2005, vol. 8, issue 2, 163-179

Abstract: This paper uses Australian data from the Negotiating the Life Course Project 1997 to investigate the impact of marriage on men’s and women’s earnings. We extend earlier earnings research and investigate whether the effect of marriage is constant for men and women at different points on the conditional earnings distribution by using robust and quantile regression techniques. We find no association between marriage and wages for women, but for men a large and significant premium exists with married men earning around $5,700 per annum more than their unmarried counterparts, after adjusting for human capital, job and family characteristics. Overall, there are very few differences in the association between marriage and earnings for men and women across the wage distribution. Although, importantly, we find that the returns to marriage tend to be smaller and non-significant for men at the top of the distribution than for men in the middle of the distribution.

Keywords: Marriage; Economics of gender; Wage Level and Structure; Econometric Methods, Single Equation Models, Single Variables, other; Statistical Simulation Methods, Monte Carlo Methods, Bootstrap Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C16 C29 J12 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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