Doctoral Dissertation Research: Women's Income and Marriage

博士论文研究：女性收入与婚姻

• 批准号: 1227471
• 负责人: Robert Margo
• 金额: $ 0.9万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1227471&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Women; Income

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.

该项目探讨了婚姻对妇女的财务影响。它使用内战养老金档案中的数据来做到这一点，这是19世纪末和20世纪初联盟军寡妇收入和婚姻历史的独特信息来源。根据婚姻的理论经济学模式，婚姻替代品或更大的“外部选择”的妇女将花费更多的时间寻找丈夫，并将进行更高质量的比赛。直观地，如果一个女人可以在单身时自我支持，她愿意等待更长的时间才能更好。寡妇的养老金可以被视为“外部选择”，因为它们在再婚后停止。研究人员将在芝加哥大学人口经济中心创建的联合军陆军数据库中建立一个寡妇样本，并在华盛顿特区国家档案馆收集了有关这些寡妇的养老金以及随后的婚姻的信息。初步结果表明，接受养老金大大降低了再婚的速度。该项目促进了越来越多的关于婚姻收益的经验文献，重点是女性。它通过隔离与妇女的个人特征无关的收入来源来确定一种新颖的表征这些收益的方式，并且不会在婚姻内造成产出，这意味着它不应影响妇女对潜在伴侣的“吸引力”。退休金的资格仅取决于寡妇丈夫去世的情况，并在再婚后停止。更广泛地说，该项目将提高我们对19世纪婚姻决策方式的理解，并将提供新的证据，以帮助理解和预测劳动力流动性和就业选择对当今婚姻的影响。该项目的最重要影响是创建其他研究人员将能够使用的原始数据库。这不仅是因为数据库是新的，而且因为19世纪遵循妇女通过婚姻的数据非常罕见，这是重要的。该项目具有潜在的政策影响，因为它将有助于我们理解社会计划的福利影响，这些社会计划改变了妇女围绕婚姻和生育的激励措施。