Women's Gains or Men’s Losses Revisited: Understanding the Context of Changes in Relative Earnings over the Duration of Marriage

Tara L. Becker, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I examine couples from the first year of marriage and compare how compositional differences between relative earnings relationships change over time. I find that in the first year of marriage, wives in husband primary-earner couples are likely to be younger and have less education than wives in couples in which the wife earns at least 40% of the couple’s earnings in the initial year of marriage. However, over the duration of marriage, many of these compositional differences are moderated as couples in which the wife has more education and high earnings relative to other women become more likely to enter husband primary-earner earnings relationships and couples in which the wife is less educated and has lower earnings relative to other women become more likely to enter egalitarian and wife primary-earner earnings relationships.