Trends in relative earnings and marital dissolution: Are wives who outearn their husbands still more likely to divorce?
- As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings and marital dissolution using data from the 1968–2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that wives' relative earnings were positively associated with the risk of divorce among couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that this was especially true for wives who outearned their husbands, but this was no longer the case for couples married in the 1990s. Change was concentrated among middle-earning husbands and those without college degrees, a finding consistent with the economic squeeze of the middle class over this period.
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| Author: | Christine Schwartz, Pilar Gonalons-Pons |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-550162 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2016.2.4.08 |
| ISSN: | 2377-8261 |
| ISSN: | 2377-8253 |
| Parent Title (English): | RSF |
| Publisher: | Russell Sage Foundation |
| Place of publication: | New York, NY |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2020 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2020 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2020/07/27 |
| Tag: | divorce; earnings; gender; social change |
| Volume: | 2 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Page Number: | 20 |
| First Page: | 218 |
| Last Page: | 236 |
| Note: | This journal article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 467707456 |
| Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung 3.0 |
