Dynamic Effects of Educational Assortative Mating on Labor Supply

Rania Gihleb and Osnat Lifshitz

Review of Economic Dynamics, 2022, vol. 46, 302-327

Abstract: The gender education gap has undergone a transition in the post-war period, from favoring men to favoring women. As a result, in 30% of young American couples, the wife is more educated than the husband. These "married down" women display substantially higher employment rates, relative to women with husbands with the same or higher level of educational attainment. We argue that the interaction between work and marital decisions can explain the higher employment rates of women who marry down. Returns to experience are key in this mechanism, since they lock in early employment choices. We formulate a dynamic life cycle model of marriage and divorce, with endogenous labor supply decisions, and structurally estimate it using NLSY79. We show that returns to experience account for 45% of the employment gap between married down women and married up women. The estimates further suggest that the changes in educational sorting patterns across cohorts can explain 11% of the rise in married women's employment between the 1945 and 1965 cohorts. Finally, we simulate a shift from joint to individual taxation. The model predicts a larger increase in married down women's employment rate. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Keywords: Educational assortative mating; Female labor supply; Human capital; Returns to experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J21 J22 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.red.2021.10.001
Access to full texts is restricted to ScienceDirect subscribers and institutional members. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/ for details.

Related works:
Software Item: Code and data files for "Dynamic Effects of Educational Assortative Mating on Labor Supply" (2021)
Working Paper: Online Appendix to "Dynamic Effects of Educational Assortative Mating on Labor Supply" (2021)
Working Paper: Dynamic Effects of Educational Assortative Mating on Labor Supply (2016)
Working Paper: Dynamic Effects of Educational Assortative Mating on Labor Suppy (2016)
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:red:issued:18-468

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.economic ... ription-information/

DOI: 10.1016/j.red.2021.10.001

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Dynamics is currently edited by Loukas Karabarbounis

More articles in Review of Economic Dynamics from Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().