On the Marriage Wage Premium∗

In this paper, we use a novel instrument based on local social norms towards marriage to present a new finding: marriage has a positive causal effect on the wages of both men and women. Despite the striking changes in the labor market and the composition of families that occurred over the last decades, the substantial positive effect of marriage on the wages of men has remained largely unchanged. Conversely, while marriage decreased the wages of women until the 1980s, we document the emergence of a sizable marriage wage premium from the late 2000s onward. The fact that marriage increases the wages of women displaces the main hypotheses that the literature discussed to explain the positive relationship between marriage and the wages of men. Namely, the idea that married men are able to devote more resources to their careers than their single counterparts because their wives specialize in home work. Further, we highlight the fact that the effect of marriage on wages is heterogeneous both between and within genders. In particular, the marriage wage premium is larger for women above the median of the wage distribution, whereas for men we find the opposite. Keywords— Wage, Marriage, Gender, Causal Inference, Marriage Wage Premium. JEL Codes— J11, J12, J16, J30. ∗We thank Effrosyni Adamopoulou, Alex Armand, Libertad González, Nezih Guner, Ezgi Kaya, Michael Knaus, Michael Lechner, Attila Lindner, Joan Llull, Shelly Lundberg, Jaime Millán-Quijano, Richard Murphy, Imran Rasul, Anna Raute, and seminar participants at the Berlin Applied Micro Seminar, the Swiss Macro Workshop, the University of Bristol, the University of Nottingham, the University of St. Gallen, the University of York, and the Online Discrimination and Disparities Seminar for valuable comments. All errors are ours. †b.i.mcconnell@soton.ac.uk. ‡arnau.valladares@gmail.com.