Emancipation Through Education

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of education in the evolution of women’s role in the society—specifically, in the labor market and in the marriage market. In particular, it aims to understand the linkages between a set of socio-economic trends since the 1950s, which include (i) the falling marriage rate and the rising divorce rate, (ii) the rising educational attainment of women, which now exceeds that of men’s, (iii) the rising average earnings of women relative to men (i.e., the shrinking gender wage gap), and (iv) the substantial rise in the labor force participation (and labor supply) of married women. We build an equilibrium model with education, marriage/divorce, and labor supply decisions in which these different trends are intimately related to each other. We focus on education because divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep a much larger fraction of the returns from their human capital upon divorce compared to their physical assets, making education a good insurance against divorce risk. In turn, as women get better education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, which in our framework leads to less marriages. The framework generates a number of powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to large rises in divorce rates and college enrollment of women and a fall in marriage rates from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. The model is also consistent with women’s college attainment overtaking men’s during this time, which has previously proved difficult to explain. Overall, we find that the interaction of the marriage/divorce decision with education choice is important for understanding the evolution of both sets of trends.