Research Spotlight: Marriage is Extra Work

An immense literature in economics is devoted to studying the labor supply of women and determining whether their supply differs by marital status or the presence of children. This literature has found, not surprisingly, that married women tend to have a lower supply of labor compared to women who have never been married. But there has been substantially less research on the relationship of marital status and labor supply for men. It turns out there is also a gap in annual hours worked between married men and men who have never been married, with married men working substantially more. Possible explanations and implications of this pattern are the subject of a recent working paper by Richmond Fed economist John Bailey Jones, alongside Adam Blandin from Vanderbilt University and Dallas Fed economist Fang Yang.