Work

‘Acting Wife’: Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

Year: 2017

Type: article

Abstract: Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (on exams and problem sets), unmarried women have lower participation grades. In a field experiment, single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real-stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences. Other groups' responses were unaffected by peer observability. A second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers. (JEL C93, D82, J12, J16, J31)

Source: American Economic Review

DOI: 10.1257/aer.20170029

Authors: Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara, Amanda Pallais

Institutions: University of Chicago, Princeton University, National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University

Language: English

Topic: Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Subfield: Gender Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Gender equality, Decent work and economic growth, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Science Foundation