Are All the Good Men Married? - Cremieux Recueil
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Are All the Good Men Married?<br>Why do married men earn so much? Is it because the good men get married, or does marriage make men good?
Cremieux<br>Sep 13, 2025<br>∙ Paid
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Link<br>Men tend to earn more than women. Among employed people who completed high school, there’s not much of a wage gap until you look at married men versus everyone else. This finding was true going very far back, and it’s remained directionally true today. This considerable salary bump has come to be known as the Marriage Premium.<br>One interesting question is Why?<br>Is there a marriage premium because wives do all the housework so men have more time to spend on their jobs? Is there a marriage premium because marriage motivates men to work? Because childbirth motivates men to work? Is it because men anticipate marriage and get ready for it by growing their incomes? Is there a marriage premium because employers discriminate in favor of married men?<br>To figure out the answer, we have to define the predictions different hypotheses make. For example, the Anticipation hypothesis holds that men work to increase their wages because they expect to take on the husband role. The Reverse Causality hypothesis holds that men delay marriage until they’re able to meet their financial goals. The Spurious Association hypothesis contends that it’s all a coincidence because in the period where men are rapidly maturing into adults and moving up financially, they’re also likely to get married.<br>One of my favorite papers on this topic distinguished between these hypotheses using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY ‘79). Their dataset of choice provided them with the means to look at the wage effects of unexpected marriages, to investigate wages relative to marriage and age, and to determine whether the marriage premium was affected by subsequent divorce. Take a look at wage trajectories surrounding marriage and divorce:
Killewald and Lundberg 2018, Figure 1<br>First, with marriage, people’s wages seem to start growing years ahead of the event itself. The increase is not statistically significant until after marriage happens in the authors’ specification, but I found this odd because, when I redid this, I had much smaller standard errors and did obtain a significant result. Others who used the same dataset and others have had similar findings. I’m going to replot the marriage data from the NLSY ‘79, but for a longer timeframe, with newer data releases included, using the method and controls from Dougherty (2005), and with results for both sexes.
This is an interesting finding for so many different reasons, and several of those reasons are theory-dependent. For example, what’s the marriage premium in this model? Is it the non-effect of marriage happening, or is it the rise leading up to marriage? For women, is it the decline that happens shortly after? (Which, I’ll add, is significantly hastened by childbirth.) For that matter, what does this say about the marriage premium as it’s typically estimated? The most common method is to use a fixed-effects model. Because that model includes single people who later marry as comparisons, it underestimates the marriage premium if we’re to count the rise leading up to marriage as part of it because people close to marriage are already earning the premium. I could keep talking about this, but I’ll digress in this section.<br>The Anticipation hypothesis predicts this result. It suggests wages will rise prior to marriage, so long as marriage is predicable. But, I’d caution against this view, because the increase begins long before people tend to be thinking about marriage with a particular person. Usually anticipation only applies about two years out, but in the NLSY ‘79, the rise is significant six years before marriage and it continues for a while after.<br>Luckily, the Anticipation hypothesis predicts other things. Those include a wage decline after divorce. On the subject of divorce, the authors noted that it “appears to be the consequence rather than cause of falling wages.” I can very significantly replicate this over a longer timeframe in their data, but though that is a controverted prediction of the Anticipation hypothesis—and a supported prediction of the Reverse Causality hypothesis—, it’s not definitive. Two things far more likely to be definitive are the effects of unexpected, shotgun marriages, and the existence of age-related moderation.<br>Anticipation predicts tiny premarital wage increases when the marriage is unexpected, and it predicts wage increases regardless of a person’s age, albeit perhaps only for first marriages. Reverse Causality predicts much the same, but the Spurious Association hypothesis does not. Findings like age-related moderation and similar wage increases regardless of marriage expectation fit best with a false marriage premium. Both of those things were observed by the authors, and this...