Does the Husband Matter?: Married Women and Employment in Italy

Abstract

In this paper I analyse how a wife's participation and outcomes in the labour market (LM) are influenced by her husband's parallel career. According to New Home Economics, both husband and wife join in making decisions about their participation and effort in paid work, evaluating the comparative advantage they have in paid and unpaid domestic work. This theory implies that a husband's career has a negative effect on his wife's participation and outcomes in the LM. Different conclusions can be drawn by interpreting the husband's occupational resources as social capital at his wife's disposal. Being married to a husband who has a high position in the LM might have positive results for the wife's employment, in terms of disposable information, direct transmission of human and cultural capital, and personal influence in the job-matching process. I assess the plausibility of the hypotheses drawn from the economic and sociological theories by means of dynamic analysis. I use work histories collected in 1996 for a national representative sample of Italian married women. The results show that the husband's resources have a negative effect on the wife's participation in the LM, while they have a positive effect on her occupational attainment. These results suggest that the economic and sociological theories can be integrated in order to account for different aspects of the mechanism determining married women's careers in the LM.

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