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The Marriage Motive: A Price Theory of Marriage pp 123–163Cite as

Household Production and Racial Intermarriage

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Abstract

One aspect of marital matching is whether individuals marry within their own race/ethnicity (homogamy) or intermarry. This chapter examines black/white intermarriage in light of a model based on an analysis of markets for Work-In-Household (WiHo) presented in Chaps. 2 and 3. Evidence of discrimination against blacks in such marriage markets is uncovered from an empirical analysis of American data for the years 2003-2009. It is found that white women married to black men devote 0.4 fewer hours per day to chores than their counterparts in all-white marriages, which is comparable to the effect of a child on their hours of chores. Furthermore, white men work less at housework when in couple with black women than when in all-white couples. These findings are consistent with markets for WiHo establishing lower prices of WiHo supplied by blacks than by whites. Conversely, blacks appear to do more chores if they are in couple with whites than when in all-black couples. Results are mostly for weekdays, not weekends, which is to be expected if underlying these results are differences in the price of Work-In-Household and on weekends home production is less likely to be considered as a chore. That our results are stronger for married than unmarried couples indicates that exchanges of WiHo for money are more likely to occur among married couples. Racial intermarriage differentials in hours of household work seem to be more prevalent among the U.S.-born than the foreign-born, possibly indicating less marriage market discrimination against foreign-born blacks.

This chapter is adapted from “Racial Intermarriage and Household Production,” forthcoming, Review of Behavioral Economics.

The original version of the chapter was revised: Co-author names are included in Chaps. 7, 9, 11, and table of contents. The erratum to this chapter is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1623-4_12.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Leisure may be more enjoyable than home production to the extent that the former activities provide a higher “experienced utility” to the individuals (Kahneman et al. 2004; Kahneman and Krueger 2006).

  2. 2.

    This assumption could be relaxed. Our predictions are reinforced to the extent that white women married to black men also have higher ability to translate a given share of gain from marriage into less time in chores. The intermarriage differential in time spent on chores will then be larger than the differential \({{y}_{BW}}-{{y}_{WW}}\). If the opposite is the case and white women married to black men are less able to translate a given price of WiHo into less time in chores this will weaken the prediction. It will only invalidate the prediction if white women are considerably less able to bargain about chores if married to blacks than if married to whites and the racial intermarriage differential in ability to translate an intermarriage differential in share from gain in marriage into less time in chores is large relative to \({{y}_{BW}}-{{y}_{WW}}\).

  3. 3.

    Hamermesh (2007) finds a negative relationship between income and time allocated to household production.

  4. 4.

    Hersch and Stratton (2002) and Sevilla-Sanz et al. (2010) show that women concentrate on routine and more time-intensive housework, such as cooking and cleaning, whereas men are more active in sporadic, less time-intensive tasks, such as gardening and repairs.

  5. 5.

    The REG3 command in STATA is used for the estimations. To allow for clustering at the state level, and the computation of the disturbance correlation matrix, we use the SUEST command, which yields results identical to those obtained with the REG3 command.

  6. 6.

    Alternative estimates using predicted wages for respondents and their spouses yield similar results (available upon request).

  7. 7.

    The nine regions defined in the GSS data are: New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island), Middle Atlantic (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania), East North Central (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio), West North Central (Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas), South Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, District of Columbia), East South Central (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi), West South Central (Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas), Mountain (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico) and Pacific (Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii).

  8. 8.

    We thank Aki Matsui from the University of Tokyo for this idea.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. San Diego State University and IZA, San Diego, California, USA

    Shoshana Grossbard, Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal & Jose Alberto Molina

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  1. Shoshana Grossbard
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  2. Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal
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  3. Jose Alberto Molina
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Correspondence to Shoshana Grossbard .

Appendix

Appendix

Table 9.9 Definition of chores
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Table 9.10 Variables and definitions
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Grossbard, S., Gimenez-Nadal, J.I., Molina, J.A. (2015). Household Production and Racial Intermarriage. In: The Marriage Motive: A Price Theory of Marriage. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1623-4_9

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