Data and Code for: The Changing Identities of American Wives and Mothers

Over the last century, resource allocations within families changed<br>significantly, as did marriage matching patterns. College educated women<br>became more likely to marry (and, to a lesser extent, have children) than less<br>educated women. A large literature documents these patterns and proposes a<br>variety of explanations. We review this literature. Then, we provide a unified<br>empirical framework, which can integrate these mechanisms. We demonstrate the<br>usefulness of that framework by employing it in decennial US censuses and<br>showing that a combination of technological changes that increased the value<br>of children's education and enabled more educated women to devote more time to<br>childrearing are consistent with multiple behavioral changes within marriage,<br>on the marriage market, and before marriage.<br><br>