| Abstract: | Differences in the pattern of marriage, cohabitation, childbirth, and intrahousehold specialization between the United States and Denmark, as well as a rich, register-based panel sample of about 35,000 young Danish men, are exploited to shed light on the nature of the male marital wage differential. The results indicate that failing to control for cohabitation can seriously bias estimates of the marital wage differential, that marriage is a more selective state than cohabitation, and that specialization may explain some of the marital wage differential in the United States but not in Denmark. In Denmark, by contrast, there is evidence that fatherhood has a significant impact on earnings. |
