What Money Buys and Family Costs: Three Papers on the Work-Family Intersection

Family responsibilities and market work have the potential to influence one another. First, financial rewards received from the labor market may provide individuals with resources that they can use to manage their family responsibilities. In the first two empirical chapters, I examine the relationship between wives' earnings and their time in housework, testing whether, to what extent, and how wives' earnings allow them to reduce their household labor burden. In Chapter 2, "Money Isn't Everything: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time", I use fixed-effects models and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and find that wives reduce housework time as their earnings rise. However, the effect is highly non-linear, with high-earning wives achieving little additional reduction in housework. Thus, high-income wives continue to spend considerable time in housework, despite their substantial financial resources. Chapter 3, "Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time", uses data from the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to test whether expenditures on market substitutes for household labor explain the negative relationship between wives' earnings and their housework time. Expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the relationship between wives' earnings and their housework time. This suggests that wives' earnings may instead allow them to "opt out" of some housework, foregoing this labor without purchasing a substitute. Additionally, family responsibilities may affect individuals' work lives. For men, becoming fathers may lead to increased investment in wage-earning, as men are motivated to provide financially for their children. Chapter 4, "A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium", hypothesizes that lower commitment to the fatherhood role and greater role ambiguity will lead to a smaller wage premium for nonresidential fathers and stepfathers as compared to residential fathers. Using panel models and data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that married, residential fatherhood is associated with wage gains, while nonresidential fatherhood and stepfatherhood are associated with wage losses compared to the wages of childless men of the same union status, and unmarried, residential fatherhood leads to no wage changes for men.

ISBN 9781124680927

Work-family balance

69330