Is There a Male Breadwinner Norm? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes

Abstract

This paper argues that distributions of spousal earnings gaps provide no identifying information for the male breadwinner norm, nor such a norm’s consequences for gender inequality. First, we show that simple marital matching models—without norm-related assumptions—closely replicate U.S. distributions of wife-husband earnings gaps. Second, we show that the discontinuity in this distribution as wives start to out-earn husbands reflects not breadwinner norms, but rather a point mass of equal-earning couples. We conclude by arguing that the point mass may also threaten other tests of the male breadwinner hypothesis, and proposing several robustness checks that future research should utilize.