This paper examines the effect of the female-to-male wage ratio, “relative wage,” on women's spouse quality, marriage, and labor supply over three decades. Exploiting task-based demand shifts as a shock to relative pay, I find that a higher relative wage (a) increases the quality of women's mates, as measured by higher spousal education; (b) reduces marriage without substitution to cohabitation; and (c) raises women's hours of work. These effects are consistent with a model in which a higher relative wage increases the minimum nonpecuniary benefits (“quality”) women require from a spouse and therefore reduce marriage among low-quality husbands.

This paper identifies the impact of increasing post-childbirth work incentives on mothers’ long-run careers. We exploit variation in work incentives across mothers based on the timing of a first birth and eligibility for the 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Ten to nineteen years after a first birth, single mothers who were exposed to the expansion immediately after birth (“early”), rather than 3–6 years later (“late”), have 0.62 more years of work experience and 4.2 percent higher earnings conditional on working. We show that higher earnings are primarily explained by improved wages due to greater work experience.