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Title: Migration and Career Attainment of Power Couples: The Roles of City Size and Human Capital Composition

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: Costa and Kahn [2000] documented that power couples tended to be located in large cities, postulating a need to solve a colocation problem peculiar to dual-career, highly-educated spouses. Using data from the 2008-2014 American Community Surveys, I find that while the point estimates indicate that young full-power couples are more likely to move to larger, better-educated cities than couples in which just the husband has a college degree, and wife-only power couples more likely than couples in which neither spouse has a college degree, the differences are statistically significant only compared with medium-size cities. Possession of an advanced degree by the wife matters more consistently for choice of city size. I also find that the wife's degree matters with respect to the human capital composition of cities. Finally, I present new evidence that larger cities improve joint husband-and-wife career outcomes as measured by occupational attainment, and that the degree of improvement is greater when the wife has a college degree, holding constant whether the husband has a degree.

Url: http://bryan.uncg.edu/econ/files/2017/01/power_couples_uncg.pdf

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Authors: Simon, Curtis J

Publisher: University of North Carolina Greensboro

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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