Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring) 1992
Korenman, Sanders and David Neumark. 1992. "Marriage, Motherhood, and Wages." Journal of Human Resources 27(2):233-255.
We explore several problems in drawing casual inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the "direct" effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and tenure); first-difference estimates reveal no direct effect of marriage or motherhood on women's wages. We also find statistical evidence that experience and tenure may be endogenous variables in wage equations; instrumental variables estimates suggest that both ordinary least squares cross-sectional and first-difference estimates understate the direct (negative) effect of children on wages.
Sanders Korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and is a faculty associate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and a research affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). David Neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the NBER. The authors thank McKinley Blackburn, David Bloom, Richard Freeman, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, Bruce Meyer, anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program, Princeton University, and the University of South Carolina for helpful comments, and Elaina Rose for research assistance. The data used in this article can be obtained from David Neumark at the following address: Department of Economics, 518 McNeil, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
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