Cohort and Gender Differences and the Marriage Wage Premium

• In Event: 420 - Research Poster Session. Communicating Sociology

Abstract

Past research has established a marital wage premium among men, and more recently, among women of the baby boom generation. It is unknown whether the marriage premium holds among more recent cohorts of men and women Using fixed-effects models and data from the 1979-1989 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the 1997-2010 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), this paper compares cohort differences in the gendered marriage premium. Men consistently receive higher marital premiums relative to women, and men’s marriage premium has doubled from the 1980s to 2000s cohorts of young men. In contrast, baby-boom women and the recent cohort of women’s marital premium is smaller and erodes when including human capital and job characteristics controls. Education and racial/ethnic group moderate the effects of marriage on earnings for women and men. College educated men and women receive higher marriage premiums and the effect of marriage on earnings is negative for black women.

Author

• Misun Lim, University of Massachusetts-Amherst