The Marriage Unemployment Gap

In this paper we document that married individuals face a lower unemployment rate than their single counterparts. We refer to this phenomenon as the marriage unemployment gap. Despite the dramatic demographic changes in the labor market over the last decades, this gap has been remarkably stable both for men and women. Using a flow-decomposition exercise, we assess which transition probabilities (across labor force states) are behind the marriage unemployment gap. We find that, for men, the higher attachment to employment of married males is the main driver of the gap. For females, we find that the participation margin plays a crucial role.