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Professor Carlin's primary research area is the family. He answers questions of how the economic environment impacts the behavior of family members. His recent work has focused on the relationship between the hours a woman works and her husband’s earnings.
It has been long established that married men have greater earnings than unmarried men, but it has only recently been observed that the earnings of married men whose wives do not work are greater than those of married men whose wives work. In addition, it is observed that the greater the earnings of the wife, the lower the earnings of the husband. There are a number of possible reasons which might explain these observations. Non-working wives can directly further their husbands’ careers by participating in some tasks and entertaining; non-working wives can indirectly further their husbands’ careers by performing household and child-rearing tasks for her husband; a working wife may enable her husband to stay in a low-paying but emotionally rewarding job; two income families make decisions based on household income and not individual income, so a husband may forego job offers requiring relocation if his wife cannot get a new job as well; and finally, employers may simply discriminate in favor of married men.Professor Carlin's work employs a Tobit two stage least squares technique to correct for endogeneity of wife's work hours in husband's earning regressions. Using data from the United Kingdom, Carlin and his British co-authors document the change from a negative relationship between these variables to a positive one.
Professor Carlin has recently partnered with an Australian researcher in investigating the effectiveness of affirmative action policies in a screening model of labor market discrimination. He is now returning to his earlier work on volunteering, examining the American Time Use Data Set to consider the determinants of volunteering among various demographic groups.
Selected Publications:
- “U.K. Evidence on the Earnings Penalty for Men with Working Wives, 1983 to 1995“ (joint with D.H. Blackaby and P.D. Murphy) forthcoming, Labour Economics 14(1):119-134, January 2007.
- “Intra-family Time Allocation to Housework: French Evidence“ (joint with Dominique Anxo), International Journal of Time Use StudiesVol. 1, No. 1, 14-36, August 2004.
- “Family Background and the Estimated Return to Schooling in Earnings Regressions: Swedish Evidence,“ with Sveinn Agnarsson, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 37, No.3, 680-692, Summer 2002.
- “Evidence on the Volunteer Labor Supply of Married Women,“ Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 67, No. 4, 801-824, April 2001.
- “What a Difference a Wife Makes: Evidence on Women Investing in Their Husbands' Careers,“ with David Blackaby and Philip Murphy, Bulletin of Economic Research , Vol. 50, No. 1, 1-18, January 1998.
- “Do Children Affect Male Labor Supply in Sweden? Time Diary vs.Survey Evidence,“ with L. Flood, Labour Economics , Vol. 4, Vol. 2, 165-181, June 1997.
- “The Productivity of Lunch and Other Break Time in Sweden: An Hedonic Earnings Approach,“ Industrial and Labor Relations Review , Vol. 50, No. 2, 324-341, January 1997.
- “Intrafamily Bargaining and Time Allocation,“ Research in Population Economics, vol. 7, pp. 215-243, 1991.
“Estimating the Implicit Value of a Young Child's Life,” with Robert Sandy, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 58, No. 1, 186-202, July 1991.
- “Home Investment in Husband's Human Capital and the Wife's Decision to Work,“ Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 4, 71-86, April 1991.
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