Fatherhood Premium

A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium: Marriage, Coresidence, Biology, and Fathers’ Wages

Alexandra Killewald
American Sociological Review, forthcoming

Abstract:
Past research that asserts a fatherhood wage premium often ignores the heterogeneity of fathering contexts. I expect fatherhood to produce wage gains for men if it prompts them to alter their behavior in ways that increase labor-market productivity. Identity theory predicts a larger productivity-based fatherhood premium when ties of biology, coresidence with the child, and marriage to the child’s mother reinforce one another, making fatherhood, and the role of financial provider in particular, salient, high in commitment, and clear. Employer discrimination against fathers in less normative family structures may also contribute to variation in the fatherhood premium. Using fixed-effects models and data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), I find that married, residential, biological fatherhood is associated with wage gains of about 4 percent, but unmarried residential fathers, nonresidential fathers, and stepfathers do not receive a fatherhood premium. Married residential fathers also receive no statistically significant wage premium when their wives work full-time. About 15 percent of the wage premium for married residential fathers can be explained by changes in human capital and job traits.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Looks Just Like Me!

Interesting.  Men fool themselves, because it's adaptive.  And it's not like the woman is going to say anything... "Yes, honey, he has your nose! And so did the mailman!"

Fathers See Stronger Family Resemblances than Non-Fathers in Unrelated Children’s Faces

Paola Bressan & Stefania Dal Pos
Archives of Sexual Behavior, December 2012, Pages 1423-1430

Abstract: Even after they have taken all reasonable measures to decrease the probability that their spouses cheat on them, men still face paternal uncertainty. Such uncertainty can lead to paternal disinvestment, which reduces the children’s probability to survive and reproduce, and thus the reproductive success of the fathers themselves. A theoretical model shows that, other things being equal, men who feel confident that they have fathered their spouses’ offspring tend to enjoy greater fitness (i.e., leave a larger number of surviving progeny) than men who do not. This implies that fathers should benefit from exaggerating paternal resemblance. We argue that the self-deceiving component of this bias could be concealed by generalizing this resemblance estimation boost to (1) family pairs other than father-child and (2) strangers. Here, we tested the prediction that fathers may see, in unrelated children’s faces, stronger family resemblances than non-fathers. In Study 1, 70 men and 70 women estimated facial resemblances between children paired, at three different ages (as infants, children, and adolescents), either to themselves or to their parents. In Study 2, 70 men and 70 women guessed the true parents of the same children among a set of adults. Men who were fathers reported stronger similarities between faces than non-fathers, mothers, and non-mothers did, but were no better at identifying childrens’ real parents. We suggest that, in fathers, processing of facial resemblances is biased in a manner that reflects their (adaptive) wishful thinking that fathers and children are related.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

"You can't cook rice with just big talk"

Amazingly, "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" played OKC last weekend and Mrs. Angus and I took it in. LeBron has already written about the film (of course), but something struck me that LeBron failed to mention:

Jiro gets special treatment!

One reason why his diner gets 3 Michelin stars might be because suppliers both save special quality fish and shrimp for him (actually his benighted son). Another might be that his rice supplier refuses to sell the kind of rice he sells Jiro to "outsiders" because "they don't know how to cook it"!

I recommend the movie. It's 1/3 food porn, 1/3 very funny, and 1/3 an exploration of the culture that is Japan.