IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/spmain/hal-01066118.html

Modelling the employment and wage outcomes of spouses: Is she outearning him?

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Bloemen

    (CentER - CentER - Free University of Amsterdam)

  • Elena Stancanelli

    (THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications - UCP - Université de Cergy Pontoise - Université Paris-Seine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, OFCE - Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po)

Abstract

This paper is focused on couple households where the wife is the main earner. The economic literature on this subject is particularly scant. According to our estimates, the wife was the main earner in one of every six couple households in France in 2002, including wife-sole-earner households. The proportion of wives outearning their husbands was 18% for dual-earners. About 24% of American women in dual-earner households earned more than their husband in 2004. Using a model of household labour supply behaviour, we show that households where the wife is the main earner may come about either because the husband has a weaker preference for work than his wife, due possibly to her high wage, or because he is hit by adverse circumstances, such as, for example, a decline in the demand for men with his particular qualifications. Positive assortative mating may also come into play. Our empirical model specifies spouse labour-market participation equations within each household, endogenizing wages and allowing for random effects and correlations in spouses' unobservables. We conclude that the determinants of wife-sole-earner households are quite distinct from those for dual-earner households where she outearns him. The probability of observing the first seems to be more related to labour market difficulties of the husband, while the latter is not. Dual-earners where she outearns him are more likely to be found among higher educated couples, and especially, among couple where the wife's education level is high.

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Bloemen & Elena Stancanelli, 2008. "Modelling the employment and wage outcomes of spouses: Is she outearning him?," Sciences Po Economics Publications (main) hal-01066118, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-01066118
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01066118v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01066118v1/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Hani Mansour & Terra McKinnish, 2011. "Who Marries Differently-Aged Spouses?: Earnings, Ability and Appearance," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1123, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    3. Rania Gihleb & Osea Giuntella & Luca Stella, 2024. "Relative income within the household, gender norms, and well-being," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 19(10), pages 1-10, October.
    4. Zeenat Soobedar, 2011. "A semiparametric analysis of the rising breadwinner role of women in the UK," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 9(3), pages 415-428, September.
    5. Pierre-André Chiappori & Murat Iyigun & Yoram Weiss, 2009. "Investment in Schooling and the Marriage Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(5), pages 1689-1713, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-01066118. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Contact - Sciences Po Department of Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.