Is There a Male-Breadwinner Norm? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes

Abstract

We find that distributions of spousal earnings gaps provide no identifying information for the male-breadwinner norm, nor such a norm’s consequences for gender inequality. First, we show that simple marital matching models— without norm-related assumptions—closely replicate U.S. distributions of wife–husband earnings gaps. Second, we show that the discontinuity in this distribution as wives start to outearn husbands reflects not breadwinner norms, but rather a point mass of equal-earning couples. We conclude by arguing that the point mass may also threaten other tests of the male breadwinner hypothesis and proposing several robustness checks that future research should utilize.