Human Capital Accumulation through Interaction between a Married Couple: Comparison between a Housewife and a Working Wife

Japanese household-level data describing a husband's earnings, his wife's working status, and their schooling levels are used to test the implications of a model proposing a time-consuming process of human capital accumulation within marriages, in which an educated wife is more productive. The empirical results support the model’s predictions: in particular (i) a housewife's schooling has a greater positive effect on her husband's earnings than a working wife’s schooling does; and (ii) the effect of a housewife's schooling increases with the length of marriage, whereas the effect of a working wife’s schooling does not change over the course of marriage.