"All the Single Ladies: Job Promotions and the Durability of Marriage"

Abstract:

This paper shows that promotion to top jobs dramatically reduce the durability of women’s marriages, but not men’s. For two political jobs – mayor and parliamentarian – we can follow successful and unsuccessful job contenders over time, both before and after the promotion. With this data, we can ascertain common trends in divorce and earnings before the promotion, and use a difference in difference approach to estimate the causal effect of promotion on divorce. To further control for unobservables, we also define a subsample close elections where the promotion is quasi-randomly assigned. For promotions to CEO of private firms, we can only analyze promotion winners, but an event study that compares promoted men and women gives strong supports to our baseline findings. Looking into  possible mechanisms, we can rule out that promoted women are differentially “tempted” by new partners after promotion. Instead, it appears that norms and behavior in the marriage  market may hinder the closure of the gender gap in the labor market. Divorces do not  occur in couples that are more equally matched in terms of age, parental leave, or earnings. Instead they occur in couples where behaviors are more traditional, which is still the case for most relationships.