Men’s Labor-Market Decline and the Rising Correlation between Spouses’ Earnings in the United States

This study examines the role of deterioration in men’s labor-market conditions in explaining the rising correlation between spouses’ earnings in the United States. Prior research treats the growth of married women’s employment as the primary driver of this trend, leaving men’s declining economic position largely unexamined. Drawing on U.S. Census and American Community Survey data from 1960 to 2019 covering 722 commuting zones, I apply two-way fixed-effects models and a shift–share instrumental-variable design that exploits local variation in exposure to Chinese import competition across male- and female-intensive industries. Both approaches indicate that deterioration in men’s labor-market conditions raises the spousal earnings correlation within local labor markets, with the increase concentrated among couples with children. The pattern is class-stratified: where men’s conditions worsen, mothers’ work hours rise among those married to higher-earning men but little among those married to lower-earning men. This rising correlation thus reflects not only the growth of wives’ employment but also the unequally distributed capacity of families to adapt to men’s labor-market decline—an adaptation that itself amplifies inequality between households.

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