Essays on Marriage and Labor Markets

The distribution of labor market activity across U.S. individuals has changed dramatically since 1960. While nearly all prime-age men used to participate in the labor force, men without a college education now experience substantial joblessness. At the same time, married women--—especially those with college degrees--—have taken up careers in increasing numbers. This dissertation explores relationships between American marriage and labor markets. It reveals new channels through which changing marriage-and-family arrangements have affected the evolution of labor market behaviors across gender and education subgroups. Its results help define the current landscape of labor and marriage inequality in the United States, and inform current debates over policies to promote job and family security. The first chapter presents a model in which young men find employment to enhance their value as marriage partners. When the effect of employment on marital value declines, young men’s employment declines as well, in preparation for a less favorable marriage market. Taking this prediction to U.S. data, I estimate that fewer young men sought employment after 2 interventions that reduced the value of gender-role-specialization within marriage: i) the adoption of unilateral divorce legislation, and ii) demand-driven improvements in women’s employment opportunities. I then use a structural estimation of the model to investigate interaction between the marriage market and male labor market shocks. Simulations find that the indirect effect of a negative shock to wages on young men’s employment, operating through the marriage market, is nearly as large as the direct effect that operates purely through the labor market. These findings highlight the changing marriage market as an important driver of secular decline in young men’s labor market involvement. The second chapter leverages the genealogical structure of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate intergenerational employment relationships. Previous measurements of the intergenerational transmission of women's employment status have been limited by a lack of detailed data on mothers' and daughters' employment behaviors. The intergenerational relationship is found to be strongest at the full-time employment margin for college-educated mothers, and substantially weaker at less-intensive employment margins and for less-educated mothers. The paper also documents a stark rise in inequality in mothers' full-time employment propensities in the 21st century, and attributes roughly 36% of this trend to differential intergenerational transmission across education groups. These results suggest a disproportionate influence in high-SES families of the childhood environment on gender identity, and that family-level transmission processes deepen the long-run effects of unequal labor market opportunities on inequality in mothers' career outcomes. The third chapter, from a work with David Lam, builds on standard marital matching models to address the question of whether it is possible to infer the existence of a "male breadwinner norm" among American families. We show that a variety of underlying social preferences about a given trait all generate positive assortative matching on that trait, and hence the same distribution of spousal trait differences in equilibrium. Applying this result to U.S. Census and administrative earnings data, we find that simple models of assortative matching can very closely replicate the observed distribution of spousal earnings differences, in which very few wives out-earn their husbands. We conclude that the distribution of spousal earnings differences in the U.S. provides little information about the existence of a male breadwinner norm or its effects on gender inequality in the labor market.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155285/1/ajbinder_1.pd