Abstract: This paper examines how marriages affect the income of men versus women over the life cycle. Using data from the 1985 to 2018 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I document that marriage increases wage rates and working hours for men but reduces both for women, with the effects most pronounced among highly educated men and less educated women. Based on this fact, I propose the mechanism of human capital accumulation to explain the contrasting results. I develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which two household members make labor supply decisions and human capital is accumulated through learning-by-doing. Household specialization and marketization of home production jointly explain the heterogeneous effects of marriage across gender and education groups.
Presented at: NUS Macro SIG Brownbag; the 2023 Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society, Singapore; the 2023 Econometric Society Australasian Meeting, Australia.
Abstract: How does the gender education gap affect household income inequality through marriage-market channels? Using matched husband-wife household surveys across income levels, we document that as women’s relative schooling rises, both marriage rates and educational assortative mating decline. Because more marriages and weaker sorting each tend to reduce inequality, the net impact is ambiguous. Counterfactual exercises show that lowering sorting in the least gender-equal tercile to the level observed in the most gender-equal economies yields a modest effect on lowering inequality. However, this gain is outweighed by the accompanying decline in marriage rates, which raises the Gini by 2 percentage points.
Presented at: NUS Macro SIG Brownbag, Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics 2024 Conference, Thailand; 18th Dynare conference, Singapore.
Labor Share over the Firm Life Cycle and Aggregate Dynamics, with Lixing Wang and Donghai Zhang.
Draft coming soon!
Presented at: NUS Macro SIG Brownbag *2
Risk-sharing Beyond Kinship in a Village Economy, with Leandro De Magalhaes, Ying Feng, Pau Milan, Albert Rodriguez Sala and Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis.
Abstract: We collect panel data on income, consumption, bilateral transfers, and kin linkage for a full sample of villagers in Malawi, covering five waves of 387 distinct households between 2022 and 2024. Using this data set, we document an active informal transfer network, with households engaging in an average of 0.8 weekly inter-household food and monetary transfers. While 64% of transfers occur among kin, transfers between kin do not respond to negative income shocks. This pattern arises partly because income and income shocks are more correlated among kins. Among transfers, only transfers from ganyu labor response to negative income shocks, while other types of transfers, including those from the government, NGO, and remittances, do not. This finding is consistent with the literature finding that elastic labor supply is an important source of insurance.
Presented at: NUS Macro SIG Brownbag