This project investigates the relationship between household roles and labor market experiences for both men and women in the U.S., and the determinants of changes in that relationship over the past three decades. Marital status and the presence of children have always played prominent roles in economic analysis of women's labor market experiences, but there has been no parallel treatment of male household roles, and joint household decisions have received little attention. The dramatic changes in marital and fertility behavior during the past several decades, and the converging time-use patterns of married men and women demand a new, more symmetric analysis of the division of labor in U.S. households.
The principal objective of the project is to provide a comprehensive study of the theoretical and empirical relationships between parenthood, marital status, and earnings for both men and women. The project will: 1. Use family longitudinal data from the PSID to describe and analyze the time paths of wages, hours worked, and earnings for men and women over the past few decades. The focus will be on joint and individual responses to changes in household roles-marriage and divorce, the birth and aging of children-and we estimate random effects and fixed effect models to control for selection into marriage and parenthood. 2. Will develop both unitary and non-unitary models of family decision-making and their implications for joint household labor supply and investment responses to childbearing. 3. Will develop empirical measures of joint household responses and to analyze their determinants in the context of the theoretical models. 4. Will examine in detail the route from child and marriage-related changes in time allocation and investment to changes in wages, including the determinants of the ""family gap"" in women's wages. 5. Will investigate the causes of intertemporal changes in the apparent effects of household roles on the economic status of men and women, using cross-cohort changes in selection into and responses to marriage and child-bearing. 6. Will compare our results for U.S. families with equivalent estimates from another developed country.
Preliminary work from a pilot sample of married couples from the PSID indicates that the consequences of childbearing for women's wages are extremely variable, and that husbands' responses to the birth of a first child are statistically significant, diverse, and strongly related to the labor supply behavior of their wives. In households in which the mother experiences a substantial interruption in labor market activity, maternal wages decline by 23 percent and paternal wages and hours worked increase following the birth of the first child, while in households in which the mother remains attached to the labor force, there is no significant decrease in the mothers' wages and the market work of fathers decreases.
This proposal outlines a set of six projects using three longitudinal data sets that will provide a wideranging analysis of the empirical relationships between marital status, parenthood, and economic outcomes. First, it will extend the pilot study to utilize the full PSID sample, include second and subsequent children, and examine heterogeneity in responses to parenthood by cohort, skill level, age at first childbearing, and other characteristics. Second, it focuses on the interdependence of responses by mothers and fathers and suggest a new approach
