Does Specialization Explain Marriage Penalties and Premiums?

Abstract

Married men’s wage premium is often attributed to within-household specialization: men can devote more effort to wage-earning when their wives assume responsibility for household labor. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the specialization hypothesis, arguing that, if specialization causes the male marriage premium, married women should experience wage losses. Furthermore, specialization by married parents should augment the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium for married as compared to unmarried parents. Using fixed-effects models and data from the NLSY79, we estimate within-gender differences in wages according to marital status and between-gender differences in the associations between marital status and wages. We then test whether specialization on time use, job traits, and tenure accounts for the observed associations. Results for women do not support the specialization hypothesis. Childless men and women both receive a marriage premium. Marriage augments the fatherhood premium but not the motherhood penalty. Changes in own and spousal employment hours, job traits, and tenure appear to benefit both married men and women, although men benefit more. Marriage changes men’s labor market behavior in ways that augment wages, but these changes do not appear to occur at the expense of women’s wages.

Nonprofit Pay in a Competitive Market: Wage Penalty or Premium?

“…We also find a small wage premium (0.5%) for married women (or wage penalty for single women), which is mainly driven by the for-profit sector (1%). This is consistent with recent studies showing a wage premium for marriage (even for women; for example, Dougherty, 2006;Glauber, 2007;Killewald & Gough, 2013), although the debate between a wage premium and penalty for married women is hardly settled (Loughran & Zissimopoulos, 2009, for example, find a wage penalty).…”

Birth spacing, human capital, and the motherhood penalty at midlife in the United States

“…This category includes women who may have been cohabiting. This is reasonable in this data because in a recent study using the same data set, Killewald and Gough (2013) found that the association between parenthood and wages did not differ for cohabiters compared to single people. Additionally, during the period in which these women are having first births, births to single, non-cohabiting mothers remained much more common than births to cohabiting mothers (Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2015).…”

“…Lundberg and Rose (2000) find some evidence for negative selection of motherhood on this basis. Yet a recent paper by Killewald and Gough (2013) finds no evidence of wage anticipation effects prior to birth in the United States. If anticipation effects exist, birth spacing will affect the motherhood penalty inasmuch as it is related to women's individual capacity for productivity or their lower labor market position.…”

Within-couple specialisation in paid work: A long-term pattern? A dual trajectory approach to linking lives

“…Also, the models (such as seemingly unrelated regressions or clustered standard errors), whilst accounting for interdependence, did not model how partners' outcomes were interrelated (e.g. Killewald & Gough, 2013). If the cross-partner influence was modelled in the fixed part, it was depicted as a uni-directional influence with the direction of causality running from the partner to the respondent (e.g.…”