This paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market. Variation in marriage-market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts: the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race, location, and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics. Using a variety of estimation strategies, including difference and fixed effects models and TSLS models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within-marriage market changes in incarceration, we find evidence that is, on the whole, consistent with the implications of the standard marriage-market model. In particular, higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry, modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry, and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men. The evidence suggests that women in affected markets have increased their schooling and labor supply in response to these changes.

This paper summarizes the dramatic changes in relative educational attainment by men and women over the past three decades. Stock measures of education among the entire adult population show rising attainment levels for both men and women, with men enjoying an advantage in schooling levels throughout this interval. Cohort-specific analysis reveals that these stock measures mask two interesting patterns: (a) gender difference at the cohort level had vanished by the early 1950 birth cohort and has been reversed in sign ever since; (b) for several cohorts, attainment rates were flat for women and flat and falling for men. This last is puzzling in the face of the large college premia that these cohorts observed when making their schooling choices. We present a simple human capital model showing how the anticipated dispersion of future wages should affect educational investment, and find that a model which includes measures of future earnings dispersion fits the data for relative schooling patterns quite well.