PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Christopher Dougherty
TI  - The Marriage Earnings Premium as a Distributed Fixed Effect
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.XLI.2.433
DP  - 2006 Mar 31
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 433--443
VI  - XLI
IP  - 2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLI/2/433.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLI/2/433.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2006 Mar 31; XLI
AB  - Wage equations using cross-sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men. One leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men. Another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect, married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market. This paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved time-distributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage. A similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women, but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage. The results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis.