Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between education and health amongst Australian women. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data set. Spouse's education is employed as an instrument to solve the potential endogeneity of educational attainment.…

Despite many studies on the gendered division of housework, there is little research on how couples divide the work of household management. Relative resource theories of household bargaining inform analyses of who does the housework, but their applicability to household management is unclear, if only because management responsibility may be…

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete-time event-history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are…

It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and…

A long-standing debate questions whether homemakers or working wives are happier. Drawing on cross-national data for 28 countries, this research uses multi-level models to provide fresh evidence on this controversy. All things considered, homemakers are slightly happier than wives who work fulltime, but they have no advantage over part-time…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

Little is known about the spousal support received by married executive women and the support behaviors that they value. This article details the results of a qualitative study of 20 senior and executive-level women, with the aim of understanding their received and valued spousal support. An inductive typology was developed through semistructured…

Using demographic and health surveys conducted between 1998 and 2001 from seven countries (Armenia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Turkey), the study found that acceptance of wife beating ranged from 29% in Nepal, to 57% in India (women only), and from 26% in Kazakhstan, to 56% in Turkey (men only). Increasing wealth predicted…

Provides an expansion and improvement of research on the factors related to wife's time spent doing housework. Results indicate that the fewer hours worked outside the home, the larger the family, the fewer number of meals out, the larger the house, the more hours are spent on housework. (JOW)

Examined relationship between wife employment status and marital adjustment using 27 studies. Most comparisons showed no difference in adjustment between wife groups and between husband groups. Differences that did result tended to favor the non-employed groups. When control measures were introduced the basic finding of no difference between…

Uses meta-analysis of five previous studies and a replication survey of 685 married men to explore the relationship between wives' employment and husbands' well-being. No direct relationship was found but family income and percentage of income contributed by the husband may be mediating variables. (JAC)

Discusses research based on a household time allocation model which assumes employment status and length of employment day are outside the realm of family choice when making daily time-use decisions. (JOW)

Suggests that changes in the work experience of wives are likely to have only a small effect on family income inequality. (JOW)

Uses a computer simulation of the distributional effect of increasing labor force participation among wives to estimate the impact on family income distribution. (JOW)

Describes how working wives' contributions to their families' income vary by characteristics such as number of weeks they work annually, their husbands' earner status, and the presence and age of children in the family. (Author)