Women's Emancipation through Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis

Fatih Guvenen · Michelle Rendall

45 citations0/0 files storedReview of Economic Dynamics

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Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics Family Dynamics and Relationships Labor market dynamics and wage inequality

Abstract

In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage.Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage.In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women.To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions.A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men.Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk.However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education.The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces.Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain.Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than onequarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.

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References

1991A Treatise on the Family 1967Human Capital, A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education 2007Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades 2006The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap 2006Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results 2007Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces 2007Life-Cycle Prices and Production 1994Small Sample Bias in GMM Estimation of Covariance Structures

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2010Brain versus Brawn: The Realization of Women's Comparative Advantage 2017Free to Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes 2024The Impact of Divorce Laws on the Equilibrium in the Marriage Market 2015Marriage stability, taxation and aggregate labor supply in the U.S. vs. Europe 2018Childcare and commitment within households 2018The effect of public pensions on women's labor market participation over a full life cycle

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