Status Maintenance or Status Competition? Wife's Relative Wages as a Determinant of Labor Supply and Marital Instability

Abstract

This paper tests two contending theories about the effect of the interaction between husband's and wife's earnings capabilities on the wife's laborforce participation and on the probability of marital dissolution. The first of these is Parsons' status competition model which suggests that, other things equal, the higher a woman's wage potential relative to her husband's the more peripheral should be her labor force attachment. Violation of this constraint by her employment in a status competitive position is presumed to lead to increased risk of marital disruption. By contrast, Oppenheimer's status maintenance model proposes that the family's efforts to enhance its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy is an inducement to the wife's employment the more congruent her potential laborforce achievement is with her husband's. Our results generally support the Oppenheimer model, although some support for Parsons' model was found. We conclude by emphasizing the need for study of the interactive linkages between husbands' and wives' careers. Models explaining male and female labor market experiences are increasingly developing largely in isolation from each other, with little in the way of systematic analyses exploring the interplay of husbands' and wives' work-related decisions and achievements. This paper is a departure from this trend. In particular, it draws on a persistent thread of speculation over the last several decades regarding the implications of a wife's employment for disruptive competition between marital partners.' Two major streams of thought are represented in the literature, each reaching strikingly different conclusions about the likely effect such status competition will have on a woman's proclivity to enter the labor force. This paper tries to examine