The Canadian federal tax reform of 1988 replaced a spousal tax exemption with a non-refundable tax credit. This reduced the “jointness” of the tax system: after the reform, secondary earners’ effective “first dollar” marginal tax rates no longer depended on the marginal tax rates of their spouses. In practice, the effective “first dollar” marginal tax rates faced by women with high income husba...

New panel data from the National Surveys of Families and Households are used to investigate effects of wives’ and husbands’ childbearing desires on their partners’ intentions, and the effects of couples’ desires and intentions on subsequent births. The results show clearly that husbands’ desires and intentions influence couples’ births, with approximately equal force to that of wives’ desires a...

In what percentage of married couples do wives outearn their husbands, and, moreover, how persistent are these patterns? This study systematically examined variation in point-in-time estimates across alternative measures of earnings, definitions of types of couples, and data sources and gauged the persistence of these patterns for a period of three calendar years using data from the 2000 Curren...

This paper examines how Japanese wives react to their husbands’ involuntary job loss and tests the existence of complementarity of a wife’s labor supply to her husband’s. Utilizing panel data on Japanese households from 1993 to 2004, we found that wives’ labor supply is stimulated when husbands suffer involuntary job loss. The detailed statistics show that not only do working wives raise their ...

Gender differences in the employment rates of 55- to 59-year-olds are concentrated among married persons. Wives are much less likely than their husbands to hold jobs and, more often, to cite family motivations as their most important reason for not working. The employment disparity is partially the result of the coordinated retirement decisions (combined with men typically marrying younger wome...

Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands’ contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self-competence among w...

Do husbands and wives have the same view of the family’s financial situation? This research shows that when couples are asked separately about finances, very different views emerge of income and wealth. Quantifying the gap between husbands’ and wives’ financial statements shows half of all couples provide family income values that differ by more than 10% and net worth values that differ by more...

This study in Egypt, measured the son preference index, its determinants, and impact on reproductive behaviour and intention of 400 mothers attending for delivery. Overall son preference index was 1.4. The causes of sex preference were mainly psychological and social. Mothers with only girls were 496 times more likely to prefer a son as compared to those with boys only. Mothers with illiterate ...

This paper develops a model of intellectual labor augmentation to explain both the marriage wage premium and educational assortative mating. We suggest that husbands and wives are complementary factors of production where a spouse’s education and skills augment their partner’s productivity and earnings potential. We test this proposition using data from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and th...

We examined the impact of job stress and physical exhaustion on the physiological and subjective components of emotional responding during marital interactions between 19 male police officers and their spouses. Couples completed 3D-day stress diaries and participated in 4 weekly laboratory interaction sessions. During interactions on days of greater stress, both spouses were more physiologicall...