@article{5d8ad8e969d54370b484a419a7a75100,
title = "{\textquoteleft}Acting wife{\textquoteright}: Marriage market incentives and labor market investments",
abstract = "Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (on exams and problem sets), unmarried women have lower participation grades. In a field experiment, single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real-stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences. Other groups{\textquoteright} responses were unaffected by peer observability. A second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers.",
author = "Leonardo Bursztyn and Thomas Fujiwara and Amanda Pallais",
note = "Funding Information: * Bursztyn: Department of Economics, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, and NBER (email: bursztyn@uchicago.edu); Fujiwara: Department of Economics, Princeton University, 131 Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, Princeton, NJ 08544, CIFAR, and NBER (email: fujiwara@princeton.edu); Pallais: Department of Economics, Harvard University, Littauer Center, Cambridge, MA 02138, and NBER (email: apallais@fas.harvard.edu). This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Stefano DellaVigna, Coeditor. We would like to thank Daron Acemoglu, Nava Ashraf, David Autor, Marianne Bertrand, St{\'e}phane Bonhomme, David Deming, Esther Duflo, Patrick Francois, John Friedman, Georgy Egorov, Paola Giuliano, Lawrence Katz, Mario Macis, Alexandre Mas, Emily Oster, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Gautam Rao, Jesse Shapiro, Francesco Trebbi, four anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Berkeley, CIFAR-IOG, LSE, MIT, NBER Culture and Institutions Meeting, Princeton, UCLA, and Zurich for helpful comments and suggestions. Maxim Ananyev, George Cheimonitis, Stephanie Cheng, Mikhail Galashin, Vasily Korovkin, Juan Matamala, Imil Nurutdinov, Sebastian Ottinger, Benjamin Smith, Maria Lucia Yanguas, and especially Jenna Anders provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from NSF CAREER grant no. 1454476 (Pallais) is gratefully acknowledged. This project received IRB approval from Harvard, Princeton, and UCLA. The experiments and survey reported in this study can be found in the AEA RCT Registry (0001456, 0001686, and 0001774). The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017, American Economic Association. All rights reserved.",
year = "2017",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1257/aer.20170029",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "107",
pages = "3288--3319",
journal = "American Economic Review",
issn = "0002-8282",
publisher = "American Economic Association",
number = "11",
}