Husbands and Wives: The New Balance of Power

It's par for the course for young analysts or lawyers to work 100-hour weeks when they first start out. The prize at the end of the tunnel for the backbreaking labor is obvious: more money plus less time at the office.

Now let's take a not-so-realistic logical leap into the world of marriage: You have been working a full-time job while your wife stays at home with the kids. Suddenly, that PhD she's been waiting for arrives in the mail and the next day she lands a job that pays about the same as yours.

The new infusion of cash should mean that you can work a little less, right?

Not so fast.

Even as more and more wives have entered the labor force over the last 40 or so years, the number of hours worked by husbands has stayed nearly the same.

(Source)

But it's not that husbands aren't picking up at least some of the slack at home. Between the 1970's and the 1990's, the number of hours spent doing chores has gone up 50 percent for married men (from about 13 hours per week to 19 hours). The total number of leisure hours for husbands has declined from about 56 hours per week to 51 hours.

For wives, the number of leisure hours didn't change between the 1970's and 1990's (roughly constant at 56 hours) while their hours spent on chores at home declined to 33 hours per week from 46 hours.

The most famous explanation in recent years for why this phenomenon exists is that the cost of things you can't do without (healthcare, childcare, etc.) is increasing, meaning that families can't afford to cut back on the number of hours worked.

But UPenn economist John Knowles proposes another explanation that only someone from his field could love:

"The reason married men's leisure failed to increase...is that higher wages have made it relatively easy for their wives to walk away from the marriage, and thus enhanced the wive's bargaining position."

So, thanks to a rise in their own incomes, wives can rely less on their husband's earnings and demand more in the marriage. Knowles estimates that the role of wives' preferences has increased from 35 percent to 45 percent.

But lest one forget, this is mostly academic fiddling. The paper arose out of the fact that the traditional macroeconomic model actually predicted a big rise in husbands' leisure time. Borrowing heavily from game theory, Knowles says his model -- which incorporates the fact that husbands working hours have not changed -- explains about 50 percent of the rise in total hours worked for both the mr. and the mrs.