Trends in Relative Earnings and Marital Dissolution: Are Wives Who Outearn Their Husbands Still More Likely to Divorce?
Level 3 - non-randomized controlled study
Longitudinal panel cohort analysis (PSID); level assigned by design analogy for non-clinical research.
OpenAlex W2512882976 · doi:10.7758/rsf.2016.2.4.08
What was done
The authors examined historical trends in the association between wives' relative earnings (specifically when wives outearn their husbands) and marital dissolution using longitudinal data from the 1968–2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). They compared couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s against those married in the 1990s, stratified by husbands' earnings and educational attainment.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical effect sizes or test statistics. Directionally, wives' relative earnings—and specifically wives outearning their husbands—were positively associated with divorce risk among couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s. This association was no longer present for couples married in the 1990s. The cohort shift was concentrated among middle-earning husbands and those without college degrees.
Why it matters
This study suggests that the historical marital instability penalty associated with female breadwinning has dissipated for more recent marital cohorts, coinciding with shifting economic pressures and marital expectations.
Limits
The abstract provides no sample size, effect estimates, confidence intervals, or p-values. The analysis is observational, limited to US panel data, and vulnerable to unmeasured confounding regarding domestic division of labor and marital quality.
Cited by
- supports Marriages in which the woman earned more than the man were historically more fragile, but this difference ceased to exist after the 1990s.