Earnings of husbands and wives in dual-earner families (ABSTRACT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Apr. 1998

Earnings of husbands and wives in dual-earner families

Anne E. Winkler
Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy Administration, University of Missouri-St. Louis

As married women have become increasingly likely to work in recent decades, their contribution to family earnings has grown as well. Indeed, in 20 to 25 percent of dual-earner couples, wives earn more than their husbands. These trends may have affected family decisionmaking, giving some women more input into family financial and career decisions. This article evaluates the relative economic positions of husbands and wives in dual-earner families, paying particular attention to nontraditional dual-earner couples, to the joint distribution of educational attainment of husbands and wives, and to the percentage of low-wage men married to high-wage women.

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