American Economic Review Vol. 107 No. 11 2017

‘Acting Wife’: Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

Leonardo Bursztyn¹; Thomas Fujiwara²; Amanda Pallais³

¹ Department of Economics, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, and NBER (email: ) · ² Department of Economics, Princeton University, 131 Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, Princeton, NJ 08544, CIFAR, and NBER (email: ) · ³ Department of Economics, Harvard University, Littauer Center, Cambridge, MA 02138, and NBER (email: )

Abstract

Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (on exams and problem sets), unmarried women have lower participation grades. In a field experiment, single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real-stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences. Other groups' responses were unaffected by peer observability. A second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20170029

Volume

107

Issue

11

Pages

3288-3319

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓