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Abstract
This study contributes to the literature by providing an empirical analysis of the determinants of marital and general happiness. The empirical analysis is conducted using US data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and an Ordered Probit Model. We also attempt to overcome the endogeneity problem between marital happiness and infidelity using a recursive bivariate probit model. One of the advances of this study is to show that the determinants of marital happiness differ between men and women in interesting ways. While infidelity has similar effects for both sexes, we find that women have a detectable preference for a traditional division of labour within the household. In addition, social class, religion, age, children and income have differential effects between men and women. In particular, for marital happiness we find diminishing returns from household income for women and satiation for men. Hence, we find that most of the existing literature has left hidden important differences in the determinants of marital happiness between men and women.
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Notes
1 Person had sex with someone other than spouse last year.
2 The GSS data used in this study do not follow individuals over time, thus, we cannot examine how the infidelity of a spouse influences his/her partner’s happiness and infidelity over time. Such an analysis can only be conducted using longitudinal data.
3 The coefficients of the recursive bivariate probit model for the infidelity equation are not reported here. The infidelity regression includes the following covariates: dummies for income quartiles, social class (middle and upper class dummies), age, spouse’s labour force participation, housekeeper/unemployed dummy, divorced, and log population in city/town of residence. We will be happy to provide the coefficient estimates upon request.
4 The coefficient on unemployment is not significant in all regressions for women. Hence, unemployment was not included as a regressor in the regressions for women reported in the article. However, we include a dummy identifying if a woman is a homemaker.
5 Stevenson and Wolfers (Citation2012) utilize the GSS to examine changes in the black-white happiness gap over time using the years 1972 and 2008. While we find no evidence of a trend in our data that cover years from 1991 to 2010, our results are similar to theirs with respect to general happiness. In 1972 black men and women were significantly less happy than whites, but by 2008 the gap had closed for women but was still significant (but reduced) for men. They also find evidence that blacks either are or expect to be less happy in marriage in that blacks are less likely to get married and, if divorced, are less likely to remarry. However, both of these results can be explained by the sex ratio imbalance as discussed in Charles and Luoh (Citation2010).
6 We also considered a specification with household per capita income as a regressor (Results that are not reported in the article, but are available upon request). Here we found that for women, income is around twice as important judging from the coefficients. More precisely, a 10% increase in household income increases the probability of being ‘very happy’ by 4% for women and 2% for men. Interestingly, our results on marital happiness exactly match preferences as indicated by online dating. Utilizing an online dating sample for men and women in Boston and San Diego in 2003, Hitsch et al. (Citation2010, p. 148) find that, ‘[t]he estimates of income preferences show that women place twice as much weight on income than men.’
7 We will be happy to provide the set of estimates upon request.