Marriage, cohabitation and women's response to changes in the male wage structure

Ren頍 Morissette, Yuqian Lu and Feng Hou

Applied Economics, 2012, vol. 44, issue 19, 2499-2516

Abstract: Using microdata and grouped data that cover the period 1996 to 2006, we assess the extent to which cohabiting women adjust their labour supply to a lesser extent, if any, than married women in response to changes in male wages. Both microdata regressions and grouping estimators unambiguously indicate that cohabiting women respond less to variation in male wages than married women. However, the magnitude of the difference is not sizeable. We also assess the magnitude of married men's and cohabiting men's own wage elasticities and find that they do not differ much. Combined with the fact that male earnings account for roughly two-thirds of family earnings, these two findings explain why the impact of changes in male wages on family earnings is very similar for married couples and cohabiting couples: in both cases, a 10% decline in male wages appears to induce roughly a 6% drop in family earnings.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2011.566180 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:44:y:2012:i:19:p:2499-2516

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2011.566180

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().