Claudia Olivetti: Social norms, labor market opportunities, and the marriage gap for skilled women

Date: 

Thursday, February 28, 2019, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies 9 Bow Street

Social Demography Seminar (SDS) presentation by Claudia Olivetti, PhD, professor, department of economics at Boston College.

 

Abstract

In most of the developed world, skilled women marry at a lower rate than unskilled women. We document heterogeneity across countries in how the marriage gap for skilled women has evolved over time. As labor market opportunities for women have improved, the marriage gap has been growing in some countries but shrinking in others. We use a model to illustrate how the (negative) social attitudes toward working women might contribute to the lower marriage rate of skilled women, and might also induce a non-monotonic relationship between their labor market prospects and their marriage outcomes. The model delivers predictions about how the marriage gap for skilled women should react to changes in their labor market opportunities across economies with more or less conservative attitudes toward working women. We verify the key predictions of this model in a panel of 26 developed countries, as well as in a panel of US states.