Cohort Differences and the Marriage Premium: Emergence of Gender‐Neutral Household Specialization Effects
| Author | Michelle J. Budig,Misun Lim |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12326 |
M J. B M L University of Massachusetts Amherst
Cohort Differences and the Marriage Premium:
Emergence of Gender-Neutral Household
Specialization Effects
Using xed-effects models and National Longi-
tudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and National Lon-
gitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data, we com-
pared cohort, gender, and household special-
ization differences in the marriage premium.
Do these premiums (a) persist among millen-
nials, (b) reect changing selection into mar-
riage across cohorts, and (c) differ by the gen-
der division of spousal work hours? Despite
declining gender-traditional household special-
ization, the millennial cohort garnered larger
marriage premiums for women and men. Posi-
tive selection explained millenial women’s mar-
riage premiums, but less of men’s. Household
specialization mattered only among millennials,
where it is gender neutral: Male and female
breadwinners earned signicantly larger mar-
riage premiums, whereas husbands and wives
specializing in nonmarket work earned no pre-
mium, or even penalties, when employed. Results
show increasing disadvantage among breadwin-
ner households, with dual earners most advan-
taged among millennials.
The gendered world of paid work, unpaid work,
and family formation was changing when Gary
Department of Sociology, 7th Floor Thompson Hall,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003–9277
(budig@umass.edu).
Key Words: families and work, income or wages, marital
status, National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY).
Becker published A Treatise on the Family
in 1981. Married women with children were
entering the labor force en masse, fertility was
declining after the baby boom, and women’s
paid work hours were rising (Wang et al., 2013).
Yet bread-winning husbands and care-giving
wives were still normativebecause most married
men did not have other breadwinners in their
households in the 1970s. In this context, the
efciency of Becker’s gendered household spe-
cialization argument—that it is rational for men
to maximize on their comparative advantage
for market work and for women to maximize
on their comparative advantage for household
production—was still plausible. Research on
the male marriage premium in heterosexual
relationships has broadly drawn on Becker’s
thesis to explain why men’s wages increase with
marriage (Chun & Lee, 2001; Dalmia, Kelly, &
Sicilian, 2014; Dougherty, 2006; Gray, 1997;
Oppenheimer, Kalmijn, & Lim, 1997; Sweeney,
2002; Xie, Raymo, Goyette, & Thornton, 2003).
Similarly, the studies of the negative/nullimpact
of marriage on women’s wages are in line
with his thesis (Anderson, Binder, & Krause,
2003; Loughran & Zissimopoulos, 2009; Van
der Klaauw, 1996), although some evidence
suggests a marriage premium for women (Budig
& England, 2001; Dougherty, 2006; Killewald
& Gough, 2013). All of these studies examined
the baby boom cohort, those born from 1947 to
1964 and who rst married in the mid-1960s to
early 1990s. These studies found male marriage
1352 Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (October 2016): 1352–1370
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12326
Marriage Premiums, Specialization, Cohort Change 1353
premiums ranging from more than 11% in ordi-
nary least squares (OLS) models (Chun & Lee,
2001; Dougherty, 2006; Gray, 1997; Hersch &
Stratton, 2000; Korenman & Neumark, 1992;
Loh, 1996) to around 7% in xed-effects mod-
els (Dougherty, 2006; Killewald & Gough,
2013; Korenman & Neumark, 1992). Stud-
ies of baby boom women found no marriage
premium (Anderson et al., 2003; Loughran &
Zissimopoulos, 2009) or small premiums in
xed-effects models of roughly 3% (Budig &
England, 2001; Dougherty, 2006; Killewald &
Gough, 2013).
Since the early 1980s, demographic shifts
eroded the gains to household specialization
and the pattern of gendered comparative advan-
tages in market and nonmarket work. These
shifts included a reversal in the gender gap in
educational attainment (Buchmann & DiPrete,
2006), older ages at rst marriage (Elliott,
Kristy, Matthew, & Rose, 2012), rising child-
lessness (Lundquist, Budig, & Curtis, 2009),
and women’s more continuous employment
around the birth of a child (Hollister & Smith,
2014). Cultural practices regarding the division
of labor at home also changed. Women’s partic-
ipation in paid work and men’s involvement in
family responsibilities are increasingly consid-
ered the normative ideal (Brewster & Padavic,
2000). Time-use studies showed that increases
in women’s paid work and men’s unpaid work
weakened the level of gendered specializa-
tion, suggesting that newer cohorts are more
characterized by divisions of household labor
that do not always follow gender-traditional
specialization (Robinson & Godbey, 1999). In
a new study, Jacobs and Gerson (2016) found
greater approval for fathers to specialize in
caregiving when their job and child-care con-
ditions were unfavorable, along with greater
support for mothers to specialize in employment
when their job and child-care conditions were
favorable, even when a mother’s earnings were
not needed by the family. These trends suggest
that gender-traditional household specialization
may be less predictive of marriage premiums
among the newest cohort of young Americans
engaged in family formation. To date, however,
no study has examined the marriage premium
among the millennial cohort.
Against this backdrop, our contributions are
threefold. First, we compare the impact of mar-
riage on wages for two cohorts of young men
and women: the late baby boomer cohort (born
1957–1965) represented by the National Lon-
gitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), and
the early millennial cohort (born 1980–1984),
represented by the National Longitudinal Sur-
vey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). We use all
available waves of data for the millennial cohort
and match comparable baby boom data based
on respondent age to examine the impact of
marriage among young workers across cohorts.
This results in an analysis of young workers
aged 18 to 31 years old. These data capture the
median age of rst marriage, which in the 1979
to 2010 period ranges from 23.5 to 26.8 among
women, and 25 to 28.3 among men (Elliott
et al., 2012). Second, we investigate the extent
to which positive selection into marriage on
factors that predict earnings explains the mar-
riage premium. Given the changing labor and
marriage markets across cohorts, particularly in
light of the increased importance of women’s
employment and earnings to family economic
success, we consider how positive selection
may vary by gender and cohort. Importantly,
we examine both male and female marriage
premiums because there is relatively little liter-
ature about female marriage premiums. Third,
we test the resilience of the household special-
ization argument to explain marriage premiums
and penalties. To accomplish this, we examine
whether the marriage premium is different by
cohort and intensity of work hours. Here we
examine the effect of marriage on women’s and
men’s wages in male-breadwinner, dual-earner,
and female-breadwinner households.
B
Past scholarship on the marriage premium has
largely focused on men and the prevailing
theoretical approaches can be divided into the
following three categories: (a) positive selection
into marriage, (b) gendered household special-
ization, and (c) employer favoritism. The rst
explanation suggests that there is no causal rela-
tionship between marriage and men’s wages;
instead, married men differ from single men
on factors that predict both men’s wages and
marriage. The second explanation posits that
married men earn more than single men because
they are more productive in market work in part
because of the domestic support provided by
wives. Finally, the third explanation argues that
employers interpret and reward men’s marital
status as a signal of stability and commitment
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