Three hypotheses are given to explain why a married woman's work hours might be related to her husband's education, even controlling for his wage rate. Data for a single cohort of women from the NLSY 1979 suggest that women's work hours are positively related to spousal education at the time of...

This paper presents a model of lifetime utility maximisation in which expectations of future marital transitions play a role in the determination of work hours. Married people with spouses who earn more are predicted to devote additional time to the labour market when they are confronted with a...