Abstract:
It is well documented that married men earn higher wages than single
men. One of the explanations for this phenomenon is the theory of
intra-household specialization with marriage making men more
productive in the workplace with discrimination and selection being
competing alternatives. Decreasing returns to marriage since 1960 goes
in tandem with less specialization in the home, but there is little
evidence of how men benefited from marriage in the past when few
married women worked and the male breadwinner norm was strong. The
wage premium for married men is investigated using matched
employer-employee data from the Swedish manufacturing industry circa
1900. The extent to which pay differences between married and single
men were related to productivity (work effort), selection/sorting (on
firms) or to discrimination can be explored thanks to detailed
information. We find marriage premia of similar magnitude to those
found in the US today. Among those who worked for productivity-related
pay, married men earned a premium because they were more productive.
Among those who worked for time rates in more modern occupations,
married men sorted themselves across employers and a premium was
supported by the union. The results indicate that the marriage premium
emerged from productivity differentials but became a general strategy
with the emergence of the modern labor market.