Marriage and Employment Returns to Female Education

This paper develops a method to jointly estimate the marriage and employment returns to education using a frictionless matching model with transferable utility. We propose indices that are independent of the marginal distributions of populations and unaffected by secular trends in education, marriage, and the female labor market. The estimation relies on widely available cross-sectional household surveys, allowing for evidence over time for the United States and about 20 other countries in different regions of the world. In the United States, we find that getting a high school or college degree does not significantly affect the likelihood of employment, but it significantly improves the quality of a spouse and a job. Attending college and graduate school, while reducing the gain from marriage compared to singlehood from 1960 to 2000, increases marriage gain in recent years. The cross-country evidence suggests that female education has a positive employment return almost everywhere, with a higher return to university education than high school. However, the marriage return to education is mostly negative or U-shaped across countries, suggesting that education can serve as a means to escape the social stigma of remaining single. Almost everywhere, conditional on being married and employed, female higher education leads to better jobs and spouses. More education has a concave relationship with spouse quality but a convex relationship with job quality