Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Zvi Eckstein
Author-Workplace-Name:Tiomkin School of Economics, IDC Herzliya
Author-Name: Michael P. Keane
Author-Workplace-Name: University of Oxford
Author-Email: michael.keane@economics.ox.ac.uk
Author-Name: Osnat Lifshitz
Author-Workplace-Name: Tiomkin School of Economics, IDC Herzliya
Title: Sources of Change in the Life-Cycle Decisions of American Men and Women: 1962-2014
Abstract: We study life-cycle decisions of five cohorts of American men and women born
from the 1930s to the 1970s in a unified econometric framework applied to CPS data. The
men and women in our model make individual decisions when single, joint decisions when
married, and interact in a marriage market. Our model succeeds in explaining differences
across cohorts in several key endogenous variables (i.e., education, work, marriage/divorce
and fertility). We explain these changes using shifts in five exogenous factors: parental
education, the distribution of potential partners, divorce laws, the wage/job offer distribution,
and birth control technology. A major change between the 1935 and 1975 cohorts is that the
female “marriage wage premium” rose from -10% to +7%. We find that changes in the
selection of women into marriage explain 75% of this change. Married women of recent
cohorts have much higher observed and unobserved skills compared both to unmarried
women and the married women of past cohorts.
X-Classification-JEL: 
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Length: 58 pages
Creation-Date: 2016-06-07
Number: 2016-W07
File-URL: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/papers/2016/SCLCD.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:econwp:1607