Marriage and Work among Prime-Age Men
Adam Blandin,
John Jones and
Fang Yang
No 23-02, Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Abstract:
Married men work substantially more hours than men who have never been married, even after controlling for observables. Panel data reveal that much of this gap is attributable to an increase in work in the years leading up to marriage. Two potential explanations for this increase are: (i) men hit by positive labor market shocks are more likely to marry; and (ii) the prospect of marriage increases men's labor supply. We quantify the relative importance of these two channels using a structural life-cycle model of marriage and labor supply. Our calibration implies that marriage substantially increases male labor supply. Counterfactual simulations suggest that if men were unable to marry, prime-age male work hours would fall by 7%, and if marriage rates fell to the extent observed, men born around 1980 would work 2% fewer hours than men born around 1960.
Keywords: labor supply; family structure; marriage; marital wage premium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D15 J1 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55
Date: 2023-01-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg ... ers/2023/wp23-02.pdf working paper (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Marriage and Work Among Prime-Age Men (2023) 
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:fip:fedrwp:95483
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
DOI: 10.21144/wp23-02
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Pascasio ().