Bringing home the bacon: Marital allocation of income-earning responsibility, job shifts, and men's wages

Studies show that married men earn more than single men, even when human capital is controlled there has been little effort to integrate the study of the marriage effect on men's wages with the literature on the division of labor in the household or to understand behavioral processes that link marital status to men's wages. This study: addresses both oversights. Three dominant perspectives on the allocation of household responsibilities suggest that married couples are likely to assign more income-earning responsibility to the husband These perspectives can be extended to predict that married men set higher earnings goals than single men. Married men are likely to be more attentive to opportunities to increase their earnings and to risks that could reduce their earnings, Using data from fire National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study focuses on men's job-shift processes. Findings indicate that married men are more likely, than single men to pursue job-shift patterns that result in greater wage gains and to avoid those that result in lower wage gains and that a portion of the marriage differential in men's wages is attributable to job-shift processes.