Placing patterns of economic assortative mating in context: A reply to Press (2004) and England (2004)

Decisions about work and marriage are as complex as they are interesting, and much remains to be learned as we consider the changing nature of assortative mating from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. The goal of our original article was to draw on insights from sociology and economics to develop and test an explicit model identifying change in the role of women's economic prospects for their position in the marriage market. All statistical analyses of marriage rely on some underlying model. In much of the prior work in this area, however, the model and associated assumptions have not been made explicit. Our original article includes a stylized formal model and discusses the simplifying assumptions underlying our approach. Whether the assumptions are so implausible as to render the results of limited interest is a matter of debate, and we address that issue below. Yet even granting the assumptions underlying our model, our approach cannot, nor does it aim to, address all aspects of the marriage market. To put our goals in context, we note that even the best models fail to explain much of the observed variance in wages-this in an arena where we might expect the measured human capital characteristics to capture much more of what matters in the labor market. The comments from Press (2004) and England (2004) highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach we take in our article, and point to several issues that remain underexplored. In this response, we concur with many of their points, and we provide some additional evidence to support our argument on a few key points of disagreement. WHEN SHOULD NONECONOMIC FACTORS INTRODUCE BIAS? Press (2004) argues that we take an economistic view of the search process for a spouse, such that "couples do not talk about their future lives; they only evaluate each other... on the basis of market signals. Their model does not capture how people sort on work-family balance and compatibility issues" (p. 1032). One need not be a social scientist to know that factors other than money go into marriage decisions, and clearly our model cannot fully explain who marries whom. But our goal is considerably more humble than this. We aim only to investigate, at the margin (i.e., holding all else constant), how the association between wives' wages and their position in the marriage market has changed over time. Our efforts to consider the role of wives' potential earnings are informative, if incomplete, as long as the aspect we are considering can reasonably be seen as independent from other factors that enter into decisions regarding partner choice. In our article, we concede that our approach rests on this assumption of independence. In particular, if higher earning women are disproportionately interested in nonmonetary aspects of potential marriages, and if husbands' monetary and nonmonetary characteristics are correlated (in Press's terms, if rich husbands are more or less likely to have cute butts), our model is misspecified. Such a misspecification might produce upwardly or downwardly biased estimates of the change in the importance of wives' potential economic contributions. HAS MALE LABOR MARKET POSITION DECLINED IN IMPORTANCE? Press (2004) and England (2004) raise reasonable questions about potential change in the importance of male labor market position for marriage. Recent research points to some increase over time in husbands' contributions to household labor (Blanchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000), and it seems sensible that women might search for husbands who are willing to share housework and child care. Nonetheless, hours in paid work still substantially outnumber hours of home production for most husbands. Moreover, despite dramatic growth in contributions by married women to family income, there remains reason to expect that male earning power has not declined in importance for marriage over the cohorts examined in our article. …