Education and Economic Gains of Family Formation: A Test of Cross-Productivity Effect

Researching on the economic gains of marriage is one of the fields in family economics studies. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to investigate marriage gains as couple's income increases while the main hypothesis is based on cross-productivity effect. The resulted evidence from families of Tehran suggests that the cross-productivity effect exists for both of spouses whereas this effect is active only from wives to their husbands in foreign studies. The results show that one year increase in wive's education leads to (in average) 2.85% increase in their husband's income and one year increase in husband's education brings about (in average) 3% increase in their wive's income. Hence, men and women are complement of each other.