The Marriage Earnings Premium as a Distributed Fixed Effect
发现已婚男性的工资溢价源于一种随时间分布的未观测固定效应，该效应在婚前出现并持续增长，婚后几年仍上升；女性也有类似但更小的效应，婚后数年下降，这质疑了婚姻促进专业化提高生产力的假说。
Abstract Wage equations using cross-sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men. One leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men. Another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect, married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market. This paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved time-distributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage. A similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women, but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage. The results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis.