Wealth and Divorce.

In the United States, wealthier couples have lower divorce risk. Wealth may stabilize marriage through its material value, especially by easing financial stress, or by providing symbolic resources, especially signaling that couples meet normative financial standards for marriage. We first show that the negative association between wealth and divorce holds net of a rich set of controls.

Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality.

The black-white gap in household wealth is large and well documented. Here, we visualize how this racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, we show that the disadvantage of black families is a consequence both of wealth inequality in prior generations and race differences in the transmission of wealth positions across generations: Black children both have less wealthy parents on average and are far more likely to be downwardly mobile in household wealth.

U.S. Mothers' Long-Term Employment Patterns.

Previous research on maternal employment has disproportionately focused on the immediate postpartum period and typically modeled either cross-sectional employment status or time until a specific employment transition. We instead conceptualize maternal employment as a long-term pattern, extending the observation window and embedding employment statuses in temporal context. Using data from NLSY79 and sequence analysis, we document five common employment patterns of American mothers over the first 18 years of maternity.

Generations of Advantage. Multigenerational Correlations in Family Wealth.

Inequality in family wealth is high, yet we know little about how much and how wealth inequality is maintained across generations. We argue that a long-term perspective reflective of wealth's cumulative nature is crucial to understand the extent and channels of wealth reproduction across generations. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that span nearly half a century, we show that a one-decile increase in parents' wealth position is associated with an increase of about four percentiles in their offspring's wealth position in adulthood.

WEALTH INEQUALITY AND ACCUMULATION.

Research on wealth inequality and accumulation and the data upon which it relies have expanded substantially in the twenty-first century. While the field has experienced rapid growth, conceptual and methodological challenges remain. We begin by discussing two major unresolved methodological concerns facing wealth research: how to address challenges to causal inference posed by wealth's cumulative nature and how to operationalize net worth, given its highly skewed nature.

New Evidence Against a Causal Marriage Wage Premium.

Recent research has shown that men's wages rise more rapidly than expected prior to marriage, but interpretations diverge on whether this indicates selection or a causal effect of anticipating marriage. We seek to adjudicate this debate by bringing together literatures on (1) the male marriage wage premium; (2) selection into marriage based on men's economic circumstances; and (3) the transition to adulthood, during which both union formation and unusually rapid improvements in work outcomes often occur. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we evaluate these perspectives.

Tethered lives: A couple-based perspective on the consequences of parenthood for time use, occupation, and wages.

Prior research on parenthood effects has typically used single-sex models and estimated average effects. By contrast, we estimate population-level variability in partners' changes in housework hours, paid work hours, occupation traits, and wages after becoming parents, and we explore whether one partner's adjustment offsets or supplements the other's. We find tradeoffs between spouses on paid work adjustments to parenthood, but complementarity in adjustments to housework hours, occupation traits, and wages.

Between- and Within-Occupation Inequality: The Case of High-Status Professions.

In this chapter, we present analyses of the roles of education and occupation in shaping trends in income inequality among college-educated workers in the U.S., drawing data from two sources: (1) the 1960-2000 U.

Does Specialization Explain Marriage Penalties and Premiums?

Married men's wage premium is often attributed to within-household specialization: men can devote more effort to wage-earning when their wives assume responsibility for household labor. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the specialization hypothesis, arguing that, if specialization causes the male marriage premium, married women should experience wage losses. Furthermore, specialization by married parents should augment the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium for married as compared to unmarried parents.

INTERGENERATIONAL OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY IN BRITAIN AND THE U.S. SINCE 1850: COMMENT.

Using historical census and survey data, Long and Ferrie (forthcoming) found a significant decline in social mobility in the United States from 1880 to 1973. We present two critiques of the Long-Ferrie study. First, the data quality of the Long-Ferrie study is more limiting than the authors acknowledge.

Return to Being Black, Living in the Red: a race gap in wealth that goes beyond social origins.

In the United States, racial disparities in wealth are vast, yet their causes are only partially understood. In Being Black, Living in the Red, Conley (1999) argued that the sociodemographic traits of young blacks and their parents, particularly parental wealth, wholly explain their wealth disadvantage. Using data from the 1980-2009 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I show that this conclusion hinges on the specific sample considered and the treatment of debtors in the sample.

Marital sorting and parental wealth.

The extent of marital sorting by socioeconomic background has implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, the role of marriage as a mechanism for social mobility, and the extent of cross-group interactions within a society. However, studies of assortative mating have disproportionately focused on spouses' education, rather than their social origins. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and exploiting the unique genealogical design of the data set, we study the degree to which spouses sort on the basis of parental wealth.

Unemployment in Families: The Case of Housework.

Unemployment has consequences for individuals, but its impacts also reverberate through families. This paper examines how families adapt to unemployment in one area of life-time in housework. Using 74,881 observations from 10,390 couples in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate fixed effects models and find that individuals spend between 3 and 7 hours more per week in housework when unemployed than when employed, with corresponding decreases of 1 to 2 hours per week in the housework hours of unemployed individuals' spouses.

Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time.

It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 796), use of market substitutes for women's housework was found to be only weakly associated with wives' time cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the earnings-housework time relationship.

Money Isn't Everything: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time.

The autonomy perspective of housework time predicts that wives' housework time falls steadily as their earnings rise, because wives use additional financial resources to outsource or forego time in housework. We argue, however, that wives' ability to reduce their housework varies by household task. That is, we expect that increases in wives' earnings will allow them to forego or outsource some tasks, but not others.