Doctoral Dissertation Research: Women's Income and Marriage

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This project explores the financial impact of marriage for women. It does this using data from the Civil War pension files, a unique source of information about the income and marriage histories of Union Army widows during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to the theoretical economics model of marriage, women with better alternatives to marriage, or greater "outside options," will spend more time searching for husbands and will make higher quality matches. Intuitively, if a woman can support herself while single, she will be willing to wait longer for a better mate. Widows' pensions can be plausibly considered an "outside option" because they ceased upon remarriage. The researcher will construct a sample of widows from the Union Army database created by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago, and collected information about these widows' pensions and subsequent marriages from the Civil War pension files at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Preliminary results suggest that receiving a pension significantly lowered the rate of remarriage. This project contributes to a growing empirical literature on the gains from marriage, with a focus on women. It identifies a novel way of characterizing these gains by isolating a source of income that is unrelated to women's individual characteristics and which does not contribute to output within a marriage, which means that it should not affect women's "attractiveness" to potential mates. Pension eligibility depended only on the circumstances of a widow's husband's death, and it ceased upon remarriage. More broadly, this project will improve our understanding of the way in which marriage decisions were made during the nineteenth century, and will provide new evidence that will help to understand and predict the influence of labor mobility and employment options on marriage today. The most significant impact of this project is the creation of an original database that other researchers will be able to use. This is significant not only because the database is new, but because data that follow women through marriage during the nineteenth century are exceedingly rare. The project has potential policy implications, as it will contribute to our understanding of the welfare effects of social programs that alter incentives around marriage and childbearing for women.