Sources of Change in the Life-Cycle Decisions of American Men and Women: 1962-2014
Zvi Eckstein (),
Michael Keane () and
Osnat Lifshitz
No 2016-W07, Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Abstract:
We study life-cycle decisions of five cohorts of American men and women born from the 1930s to the 1970s in a unified econometric framework applied to CPS data. The men and women in our model make individual decisions when single, joint decisions when married, and interact in a marriage market. Our model succeeds in explaining differences across cohorts in several key endogenous variables (i.e., education, work, marriage/divorce and fertility). We explain these changes using shifts in five exogenous factors: parental education, the distribution of potential partners, divorce laws, the wage/job offer distribution, and birth control technology. A major change between the 1935 and 1975 cohorts is that the female “marriage wage premium” rose from -10% to +7%. We find that changes in the selection of women into marriage explain 75% of this change. Married women of recent cohorts have much higher observed and unobserved skills compared both to unmarried women and the married women of past cohorts.
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2016-06-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/papers/2016/SCLCD.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Sources of Change in the Life-Cycle Decisions of American Men and Women: 1962-2014 (2016) 
Working Paper: Sources of Change in the Life-Cycle Decisions of American Men and Women: 1962-2014 (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:nuf:econwp:1607
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Collett ().