This aim of this paper is to examine whether a man’s education has an effect on
his wife’s labour market behaviour, after controlling for his wages. Using a simple
model of household production, three possible explanations for a relationship between
labour supply and spousal education are given. Each yields different predictions
regarding the direction of the relationship, how it should vary over the course of a
marriage and whether a pattern should also be seen in women’s preferences for
market versus non-market work. These predictions are then tested using 30 years of
data on a single cohort of American women from the National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth (NLSY) 1979, as well as four cross-sections of data from the Current
Population Survey (CPS) spanning the same time period (specifically, 1980-2010)