Career Choice, Marriage-Timing,and the Attraction of Unequals

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Career Choice, Marriage-Timing,and the Attraction of Unequals

Author Info

Sylvain Dessy (Université Laval, CIRPÉE)
Habiba Djebbari () (Université Laval, CIRPÉE and IZA Bonn)

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Sylvain Dessy

Abstract

Both men and women wish to have a family and a rewarding career. In this paper, we show that the under-representation of women in high-powered professions may reflect a coordination failure in young women’s marriage-timing decisions. Since investing in a highpowered career imposes time strain, it precludes early participation in the marriage market. Delayed participation in the marriage market has a higher cost for women than for men because women have shorter fecundity horizons. Marriage prospects of high-powered women depend on the marriage-timing decisions of younger women. Under these assumptions, we show that women’s marriage-timing decisions exhibit strategic complementarities. Coordination failures in women’s marriage-timing decisions lead to persisting gender differences in career choices. Yet, differential fecundity is only necessary, but not sufficient to obtain gender inequality in high-powered professions. We discuss social changes that solve the coordination failure while achieving a Pareto-improvement in the society at large.

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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 1561.

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Length: 35 pages
Date of creation: Apr 2005
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Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp1561

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Paper
- Sylvain Dessy & Habiba Djebbari, 2005. "Career Choice, Marriage-Timing, and the Attraction of Unequals," Cahiers de recherche 0507, CIRPEE. [Downloadable!]

Find related papers by JEL classification:
J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2005-04-24 (All new papers)

References listed on IDEAS
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

Gillian Hamilton & Aloysius Siow, 2007. "Class, Gender and Marriage," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(4), pages 549-575, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)

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