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Wives' Relative Wages, Husbands' Paid Work Hours, and Wives' Labor‐Force Exit
Author(s) -
Shafer Emily Fitzgibbons
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of marriage and family
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.578
H-Index - 159
eISSN - 1741-3737
pISSN - 0022-2445
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00802.x
Subject(s) - earnings , national longitudinal surveys , affect (linguistics) , wage , labour economics , economics , demographic economics , work (physics) , wage rate , psychology , mechanical engineering , engineering , accounting , communication
Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ( N = 2,254) and discrete‐time event‐history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are their own or their husbands' absolute wages. In addition, I show that women married to men who work more than 45 hours per week are more likely to exit the labor force than are wives whose husbands' work approximately 40 hours per week. My findings highlight the need to examine how women's partners affect women's labor‐force participation.