Behind Every Successful Man There Is a Woman: The Effects of Within-Household Specialization on Male and Female Careers

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Economic Theory ; Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462655750

This research project investigates how specialization within the household influences the careers of primary earners, and which consequences intra-household specialization has for gendered labor market outcomes in equilibrium. Specialization of couples into a home-worker (typically the wife) taking care of household chores and possibly children on the one hand, and a market-worker (typically the husband) concentrating on earning an income, was the prevalent model for couples in the past. While it has been losing importance over time, it is still rare that couples participate equally in household chores and market work, or that wives earn more than their husbands. In this project, we investigate whether there are positive effects of intra-household specialization on the careers of husbands whose wives specialize on household production, and what general equilibrium implications this specialization has if men and women, both single and married, compete in the labor market. We use maternity leave reforms as exogenous variation leading to different degrees of intra-household specialization across couples. The longer mothers can benefit from paid leave, the likelier it is that couples engage in intra-household specialization. The existing papers on maternity leave reforms focus on the effect for mothers or children, while the focus of this project lies on fathers. To what degree do maternity leave reforms and the associated intra-household specialization make it easier for fathers to succeed in the labor market, and which general equilibrium effects does this have? While the first part of this project focuses on the direct effects of intra-household specialization on the husbands in specializing households, the second part of the project analyzes the equilibrium effects of intra-household specialization in frictional labor markets. There are three channels through which equilibrium labor market effects can arise. First, in the direct effect, husbands whose wives concentrate on household work should experience less disutility from working long hours or putting effort into their job, because they can avoid the disutility from household work. Second, in the labor market these men compete with singles, who do not have equivalent support at home, as well as married women, who suffer from the added burden of taking on the majority of household chores if they are also in couples who specialize. For firms, hiring a married man could thus be preferable if they put positive value on the flexibility of workers. Third, anticipating that married couples most likely specialize to some degree with the woman taking over the majority of the household work, firms could prefer hiring young men over young women independent of marital status, given that the expected surplus of a match with a man would then exceed the one with a woman.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5399: Macroeconomic Implications of Intra-Household Decision Making
• International Connection: Norway, USA
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Elisabeth Artmann; Dr. Philipp Grübener
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Alexander Bick; Dr. Katrine Vellesen Løken