Human Capital Accumulation through Interaction between a Married Couple: Comparison between a Housewife and a Working Wife

Mano, Yukichi and Yamamura, Eiji (2011): Human Capital Accumulation through Interaction between a Married Couple: Comparison between a Housewife and a Working Wife.

Abstract

Japanese household-level data describing a husband's earnings, his wife's working status, and their schooling levels are used to test the implications of a model proposing a time-consuming process of human capital accumulation within marriages, in which an educated wife is more productive. The empirical results support the model’s predictions: in particular (i) a housewife's schooling has a greater positive effect on her husband's earnings than a working wife’s schooling does; and (ii) the effect of a housewife's schooling increases with the length of marriage, whereas the effect of a working wife’s schooling does not change over the course of marriage.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Human Capital, Married Couple,Housewife, Working Wife
• Subjects: J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J12 - Marriage ; Marital Dissolution ; Family Structure ; Domestic Abuse; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J24 - Human Capital ; Skills ; Occupational Choice ; Labor Productivity

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