Are All The Good Men Married? Uncovering the Sources of the Marital Wage Premium

Kate Antonovics () and Robert Town

University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego

Abstract: A longstanding and yet unsettled question in labor economics is: does marriage cause men's wages to rise? Cross-sectional wage studies consistently find that married men earn significantly higher wages than do men who are not currently married. However, it is well-known that inferring causal relationships from crosssectional analysis is inappropriate because of the biases introduced by unobserved heterogeneity. As a means of circumventing this problem, this paper uses data on identical twins to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Our estimates suggest that marriage increases men's wages by as much as 27%, and that little, if any, of the cross-sectional relationship between marriage and wages is due to selection. In addition, we find little evidence that the marital-wage premium is a consequence of household specialization.

Keywords: Marriage; Wage Premium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-11-01
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Journal Article: Are All the Good Men Married? Uncovering the Sources of the Marital Wage Premium (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsdec:qt06s8022j

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