Honey I Love You, but … Investigating the Causes of the Earnings Penalty of Being a Tied-migrant Military Spouse

Abstract

Prior empirical research on the earnings penalty of being a tied-migrant has focused primarily on the working wives of servicemen. Over the last couple of decades the increased number of women in the armed forces makes it feasible to study the earnings of another group of tied-migrants, the husbands of servicewomen. Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, Sample Edited Detail File (SEDF), we show that there is a consistently lower age-earnings pattern for military husbands as well as wives. These annual earnings patterns capture the essence of, but do not provide an explanation for, the observed annual earnings differences. These differences are evaluated using multivariate analysis accounting for sample selectivity. Moreover, decomposition analysis strongly suggests that demand-side factors account for a greater portion of the differences in annual earnings than has been previously acknowledged and, therefore, that retention might respond favorably to job matching assistance and/or employer hiring incentives offered military spouses.