Unemployment Duration of Spouses: Evidence From France

Stefania Marcassa (1)

1 THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications

This paper analyzes the conditional probability of leaving unemployment of French married individuals from 1991 to 2002. We find that the effect of spousal labor income on unemployment duration is asymmetric for men and women. In particular, the probability of men to find a job is increasing in wife labor income, while it is decreasing in husband's earnings for women. To adjust for endogenous selection into marriage, we use the quarter of birth as an instrumental variable for the spousal wage. Finally, we show that introducing a breadwinner stigma in a joint job search model generates the positive correlation observed for men in the data.

Mots clés: unemployment duration; hazard models; labor income; marriage; joint search theory

Domaines: Economies et finances

Stefania Marcassa. Unemployment Duration of Spouses: Evidence From France. 2013. ⟨hal-00869323⟩