The Spousal Wage Boost: Working Together to Beat the Gender Wage Gap

That is another AEA paper, by Andrew Langan and Betsey Stevenson, once again abstract only:

Individuals who work in the same occupation as their spouse have significantly higher earnings on average than similar people whose spouses work in different occupations. For instance, a lawyer married to a lawyer makes more than an otherwise identical lawyer married to a physician or a teacher. The earnings effect associated with such “same-occupation marriages” is negative for less-educated men but positive for other groups and stronger for women than men. This effect holds throughout the last several decades in cross-sectional US data, and cannot be explained by hours worked, education, self-employment, or other observables.

I have not read the paper, but I wonder if this is necessarily as feminist a result as it might at first seem…