Abstract
We examine changes in marriage and earnings patterns across four cohorts born between 1936 and 1975 using data from Survey of Income and Program Participation panels linked to administrative data on earnings. We find that, for both men and women, marriage has become increasingly positively associated with education and earnings potential. We compare ordinary least squares and fixed-effect estimates of the earnings differential associated with marriage. We find that the marriage earnings gap fell for women in fixed-effect estimates, implying that the impact of specialization has diminished over time. We also find that increasingly positive selection into marriage overstates the reduction in the marriage earnings gap. Although marriage is no longer associated with lower earnings among women in our most recent cohort, the motherhood gap remains large. Among men, we find that the marriage premium actually increases for more recent birth cohorts in fixed-effects regressions.
- Copyright © 2016 by Russell Sage Foundation. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Reproduction by the United States Government in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose. Any opinions and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau, the SSA, the NBER, or any other agency of the federal government. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential information is disclosed. This research was supported by the U.S. Social Security Administration through Grant #NB10–10 to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as part of the SSA Retirement Research Consortium. We would like to thank Martha Bailey, Thomas DiPrete, and other participants of the Russell Sage conference “Changing Roles and the Status of Women,” and Martha Stinson for helpful comments. We also thank Gary Benedetto and Martha Stinson for help in using the data. Direct correspondence to: Chinhui Juhn at cjuhn{at}uh.edu, University of Houston, Department of Economics, 3623 Cullen Boulevard, Room 204, Houston, TX 77204–5019; and Kristin McCue at kristin.mccue{at}census.gov, U.S. Census Bureau, CES/2K130E, 4600 Silver Hill Rd., Washington, D.C. 20233–6300.
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