The term trailing spouse is used to describe a person who follows their life partner to another city because of a work assignment. The term is often associated with people involved in an expatriate assignment [1] but is also used by academia on domestic assignments. Other terms may include expat partner, military dependent, and accompanying spouse. [2]
The earliest citation of the term trailing spouse is attributed to Mary Bralove in a Wall Street Journal article in 1981 titled "Problems of Two-Career Families Start Forcing Businesses to Adapt." [3]
Another personnel man remembers the promising executive he lost because her husband was a dentist who couldn't find a good practice to join in the area. To cope with this problem, some 150 northern New Jersey employers participate in an employer job bank. The bank is designed to provide job leads for "the trailing spouse" of a newly hired or transferred executive.
Trailing spouses are a common phenomenon among military and foreign service households, [4] as well as in private sector companies with employees in different cities, states, and countries. As the conditions of employment require a geographic relocation, the employee's spouse is faced with a major transition that includes personal and professional challenges.
In economics, trailing spouses have been traditionally called tied movers. The term tied mover was coined by Mincer (1978) [5] and it refers to a family migrant who, if single, would not have chosen to migrate. On the other hand, tied stayer is a family non-migrant who, if single, would have chosen to migrate. The issue of family migration decision-making in economics was first approached by Sandell (1977), [6] Mincer (1978) [7] and Polachek and Horvath (1977). [8] These authors recognized that even if the family ’gains’ from migration, on an individual level some family members might ’lose’ from moving. Using a unitary conceptualization of the household, these models predicted that the spouse with a more discontinuous labour force participation and less market earning power (e.g. motherhood, non-market activities) has smaller gains from migration and hence is more likely to be a tied mover.
In sociology, Lichter (1983) [9] emphasized the importance of martial power while Shihadeh (1991) [10] and Bielby and Bielby (1992) [11] argued that gender roles also weighted in the family decision to migrate. According to these last authors, women were more likely to be tied movers or trailing spouses not because of their lower human capital but because of their prescribed role within societies. Some empirical studies in economics have later allowed for gender asymmetric migration by assigning a lower weight to the returns of the wife in the Mincer model (Foged, 2016 [12] ., Krieger, 2019. [13] )
Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.
An expatriate is a person who resides outside their native country.
Relocation services, employee relocation, military Permanent Change of Station (PCS) or workforce mobility include a range of internal business processes to transfer employees, their families, and/or entire departments of a business to a new location. Like other types of employee benefits, these processes are usually administered by human resources specialists within a corporation. In the military, these processes are administered by the Transportation Management Office (TMO) and Personal Property Shipping Office (PPSO).
Jacob Mincer, was a father of modern labor economics. He was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Economics and Social Relations at Columbia University for most of his active life.
Employment discrimination is a form of illegal discrimination in the workplace based on legally protected characteristics. In the U.S., federal anti-discrimination law prohibits discrimination by employers against employees based on age, race, gender, sex, religion, national origin, and physical or mental disability. State and local laws often protect additional characteristics such as marital status, veteran status and caregiver/familial status. Earnings differentials or occupational differentiation—where differences in pay come from differences in qualifications or responsibilities—should not be confused with employment discrimination. Discrimination can be intended and involve disparate treatment of a group or be unintended, yet create disparate impact for a group.
Sherwin Rosen was an American labor economist. He had ties with many American universities and academic institutions including the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, Stanford University and its Hoover Institution. At the time of his death, Rosen was Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and president of the American Economic Association.
Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and other short-term stays in a destination country do not fall under the definition of immigration or migration; seasonal labour immigration is sometimes included, however.
The IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, until 2016 referred to as the Institute of the Study of Labor (IZA), is a private, independent economic research institute and academic network focused on the analysis of global labor markets and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.
Maxine Leeds Craig is a professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Davis (USA).
Family economics applies economic concepts such as production, division of labor, distribution, and decision making to the family. It is used to explain outcomes unique to family—such as marriage, the decision to have children, fertility, time devoted to domestic production, and dowry payments using economic analysis.
Reverse brain drain is a form of brain drain where human capital moves in reverse from a more developed country to a less developed country that is developing rapidly. These migrants may accumulate savings, also known as remittances, and develop skills overseas that can be used in their home country.
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Household economics analyses all the decisions made by a household. These analyses are both at the microeconomic and macroeconomic level. This field analyses the structures of households, the behavior of family members, and their broader influence on society, including: household consumption, division of labour within the household, allocation of time to household production, marriage, divorce, fertility, investment in children, and resource allocation. Malthus and Adam Smith studied the economics of the family in part by looking at the relationship between family size and living wage. Similarly, J.S. Mill and Le Play analysed the impacts of different family structures on the standard of living of different family members through redistribution of family resources, insurance and self production.
The breadwinner model is a paradigm of family centered on a breadwinner, "the member of a family who earns the money to support the others." Traditionally, the earner works outside the home to provide the family with income and benefits such as health insurance, while the non-earner stays at home and takes care of children and the elderly. The breadwinner model largely arose in western cultures after industrialization occurred. Before industrialization, all members of the household—including men, women, and children—contributed to the productivity of the household. Gender roles underwent a re-definition as a result of industrialization, with a split between public and private roles for men and women, which did not exist before industrialization.
Alan Manning is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics.
Women migrant workers from developing countries engage in paid employment in countries where they are not citizens. While women have traditionally been considered companions to their husbands in the migratory process, most adult migrant women today are employed in their own right. In 2017, of the 168 million migrant workers, over 68 million were women. The increase in proportion of women migrant workers since the early twentieth century is often referred to as the "feminization of migration".
The Mincer earnings function is a single-equation model that explains wage income as a function of schooling and experience. It is named after Jacob Mincer. Thomas Lemieux argues it is "one of the most widely used models in empirical economics". The equation has been examined on many datasets. Typically the logarithm of earnings is modelled as the sum of years of education and a quadratic function of "years of potential experience".
Reuben Gronau is an Israeli economist, notable for his contributions to labour economics and economic sociology, in particular the Gronau model of time allocation and home production.
Paula S. England, is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.