Marrying Your Mom: Preference Transmission and Women's Labor and Education Choices

Raquel Fernandez, Alessandra Fogli and Claudia Olivetti

No 9234, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper argues that the evolution of male preferences contributed to the dramatic increase in the proportion of working and educated women in the population over time. Male preferences evolved because some men experienced a different family model one in which their mother was skilled and/or worked. These men, we hypothesize, were more inclined to marry women who themselves were skilled or worked. Our model endogenizes the evolution of preferences in a dynamic setting and examines how it affected women's education and labor choices. We present empirical evidence based on GSS data that favors our transmission mechanism. We show that men whose mothers were more educated or worked are more likely to marry similar women themselves.

JEL-codes: I20 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-09
Note: EFG LS ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9234.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Marrying Your Mom: Preference Transmission and Women's Labour and Education Choices (2002)
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:nbr:nberwo:9234

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9234

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().