Doctoral Dissertation Research: Women's Income and Marriage

这个项目探讨了婚姻对妇女的经济影响。它使用的是内战养老金档案中的数据，这是一个关于19世纪末和20世纪初联邦军队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型，拥有更好的婚姻替代品或更多“外部选择”的女性将花费更多时间寻找丈夫，并将进行更高质量的匹配。直觉上，如果一个女人能在单身时养活自己，她会愿意等待更长的时间来寻找更好的伴侣。寡妇的养恤金可以合理地被视为一种“外部选择”，因为她们在再婚时就停止了养恤金。研究人员将从芝加哥大学人口经济学中心创建的联邦军队数据库中构建一个寡妇样本，并从华盛顿国家档案馆的内战养老金档案中收集有关这些寡妇养老金和随后婚姻的信息。初步结果表明，领取养恤金大大降低了再婚率。该项目有助于编写越来越多的关于婚姻收益的经验文献，重点是妇女。它确定了一种新的方式来描述这些收益，通过隔离与妇女的个人特征无关的收入来源，这不会有助于婚姻中的产出，这意味着它不应该影响妇女对潜在配偶的“吸引力”。领取养恤金的资格仅取决于寡妇的丈夫死亡的情况，再婚后即停止领取。更广泛地说，这个项目将提高我们对世纪婚姻决策方式的理解，并将提供新的证据，有助于理解和预测劳动力流动和就业选择对当今婚姻的影响。该项目最重要的影响是创建了一个原始数据库，其他研究人员将能够使用。这一点意义重大，不仅因为数据库是新的，而且因为跟踪19世纪妇女婚姻状况的数据极其罕见。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，这些计划改变了妇女结婚和生育的激励措施。

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.