# Trends in couples' work patterns after childbirth

> **NIH NIH R01** · CORNELL UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $379,055

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
We propose to examine trends in couples’ work and earnings in the years following childbirth and the
implications of these couple-level processes for changes in aggregate inequality over time. We will address
critical gaps in the literature regarding how couples sort into marriage and how they negotiate roles within
marriage. Consistent with a shift away from sex-differentiated specialization in marriage, socioeconomic
characteristics predicting marriage have grown more similar for men and women over time, as have the
earnings of husbands and wives within marriage. Yet once married, and particularly after the birth of a child,
wives take on greater domestic responsibilities and husbands take on a greater share of market work; these
adjustments result in widening earnings differentials between spouses. There has been very little work on how
couple-level adjustments have changed over time, how they differ for couples with high and low earnings, or
what their implications might be for (a) trends in the economic resemblance of spouses or (b) trends in social
inequality more broadly. Understanding the processes that generate inequality is critical given its strong links to
poorer health and well-being. We will use four decades of successive, short-run panels from the Current
Population Survey (CPS) to assess changes in husbands’ and wives’ work and earnings following a first birth.
We rely on newly available identifiers from 1976-2015 to link couples longitudinally across the full 16 months of
their CPS participation, resulting in 480 overlapping panels for hundreds of thousands of couples. These data
are the largest and longest running longitudinal data source in the U.S. and are virtually untapped for research
on family dynamics and change. We will address five specific aims: AIM 1) Develop and make syntax publicly
available to produce a couple-level, longitudinal CPS database and weights from 1976-2015; AIM 2) Examine
trends in the within-couple division of market work following childbirth; AIM 3) Examine how within-couple
trends in the division of market work following childbirth vary by his and her prior earnings; AIM 4) Link couple-
level changes in work and earnings to aggregate inequality, decomposing change in earnings inequality among
couples into changes in the economic resemblance of partners before and after childbirth; AIM 5) Assess the
implications of increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing for our study results, examining trends in
unmarried mothers’ employment and earnings and their contributions to aggregate inequality.The research
team has extensive expertise in studying U.S. family change and unparalleled experience in data integration,
record linkage, and the CPS. This project offers great potential to inform science on the within-family levers
that contribute to between-family divergence in economic well-being. What we learn will be directly relevant for
understanding past, current, and future pa...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10000190
- **Project number:** 5R01HD091125-03
- **Recipient organization:** CORNELL UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** KELLY MUSICK
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $379,055
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-08-22 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10000190

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10000190, Trends in couples' work patterns after childbirth (5R01HD091125-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10000190. Licensed CC0.

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