Christine Schwartz - University of Wisconsin
The Growing Economic Resemblance of Spouses: Changes in Assortative Mating or the Division of Labor in Marriage?
Date: 11/14/2013 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 270
Organizer: Giovanna Merli
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
12:30pm - lunch (Gassman-Pines, Amar Hamoudi, Seth Sanders)
1:30pm - DuPRI students Marina Mileo Gorsuch, Poh Lin Tan
2:00pm - Jessica Ho
2:30pm - Duncan Thomas
3:00pm - Elizabeth Frankenberg
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
5:00pm - Jessi Streib
6:15pm - dinner (Christine, Giovanna, Joe Hotz)
Additional Comments: ABSTRACT: The growing economic resemblance of spouses has contributed to rising economic inequality among married couple households in the United States. Little is known, however, about why the association between spouses’ earnings increased. Did it increase primarily because of increases in assortative mating or because of changes in the division of labor after marriage? This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to decompose increases in the correlation between spouses’ earnings from 1970 to 2009 into parts due to (a) changes in assortative mating and (b) changes in the division of labor after marriage. We find that both processes contributed to the growing economic resemblance of spouses, but that changes after marriage exert a much larger impact compared to changes in assortative mating.