Abstract: We develop a model where selection into marriage and household search generate a marital wage premium. Beyond selection, married individuals earn higher wages for two reasons. First, income pooling within a joint household raises risk-averse individuals' reservation wages. Second, married individuals climb the job ladder faster, as they internalize that higher wages increase their partner's selectivity over offers. Specialization according to comparative advantage in search generates a premium that increases in spousal education, as in the data. Quantitatively, household search explains 10-33% and 20-58% of the premium for males and females respectively, and accounts for its increase with spousal education.

Data and code for peer-reviewed article published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. When citing this dataset, please also cite the associated article. A sample Publication Citation is provided below.