Labor Force Participation and Information Sharing by Married Couples: An Interracial Comparison

Abstract

Social science researchers have long noted a tendency for individuals to marry persons similar to themselves with respect to age, ethnicity and social class. In this paper we devote particular attention to racial combinations in marriage and patterns of labor force participation by spouses. Our principal objective is to detennine whether the interdependence of spouses' employment differs across race combinations of husbands and wives. Our analysis is based on a sample of blacks and whites extracted from the 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample of the U.S. Census. Using a model ofdummy endogenous variables with structural shift, we estimate models ofemployment in which each spouse's job status is explicitly related to the labor market attachment of his partner. Our results indicate that marriages distinguished by different combinations of spouses' race show some distinctive features with regard to the extent of interdependence between spouses' labor market outcomes. (J2)