Law Commons^™

Household Specialization And The Male Marriage Wage Premium, Joni Hersch, Leslie S. Stratton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages, on average, than otherwise similar unmarried men. One commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production, enabling the former - usually the husband - to acquire more market-specific human capital and, ultimately, earn higher wages. The authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single …