Is it all about the money? Associations in spousal wages and non-wage attributes

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the role of working conditions in the labor market, in particular with regard to explaining differences between men and women. This literature argues that women have stronger preferences for better working conditions than men and that they are willing to accept lower wages in exchange for obtaining them. However, this literature largely ignores household level choices. The literature on joint labour supply decision assumes that couples join forces in generating both labour market earnings and household production. So correlations of wages between couples may either be driven by positive assortative mating or by within household specialization. The same forces might be at play when couples choose their levels of working conditions. This thesis summarizes the existing literature and then uses survey data on wages and working conditions to investigate how these variables are distributed within couples.