Historically, one of the most robust findings from human capital wage equations has been that married men earn more than men who never marry. However, the earnings premium paid to married compared with never-married men declined by more than 40 percent during the 1980s. Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys (young men and youth co­horts) are used to explore two competing explanations for this decline: changes in the selection of high-wage men into marriage and changes in the productivity effects of marriage due to declining specialization within households. The results suggest that the drop in the marriage wage premium was due largely to a decline in the productivity effects as­sociated with marriage. Instrumental variables estimation suggests that these declining productivity effects can be explained by a reduction in the average degree of specialization across households coupled with an increase in the wage penalty associated with wives’ labor market hours.

The author is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Project No. 1-6-53846. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 1995 Population Association of America Meetings in San Francisco. The author thanks Andrea Beller, Martin Browning, Kermit Daniel, Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman, Kevin Hallock, H. Elizabeth Peters, two anonymous referees, and particularly David Neumark for useful com­ments and discussions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in November 1997 through December 2000 from the author, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Uni­versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801.