Women's labor force participation and earnings dramatically increased after World War II. Those changes have important … implications for women's Social Security benefits. This article uses the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the …

retreat from marriage, particularly among black women, means the distributional impact of these benefits changes dramatically … lifetime earners. However, two-thirds of older women receive spouse and widow benefits and the distributional impact of those … status and generally require recipients to be either currently married or to have had a ten-year marriage. The unprecedented …

The Social Security program, like the federal income tax system, is not marriage neutral. In the income tax literature … couple, in effect, faces a marriage penalty (marriage subsidy). Similarly, provisions in Social Security lead to marriage … subsidies or penalties. In this paper, we examine marriage penalties associated with Social Security's child-in-care benefits …