Wage Differentials between Commons-Law and Legally Married Workers in Canada

Abstract

Common-law is now an important marital status in Canada and an amazingly large number of individuals live common-law in the province of Quebec. In this paper, I focus on the factors that affect marital status and the marriage wage differential between common-law and legally married individuals. I use the public use microdata file of the National Household Survey (NHS) 2011 as my working dataset. With two equations using respectively marital status and logarithm of wage as dependent variables, I find that individuals who have high educational attainment, are immigrant, speak English as mother tongue and have children are relatively more likely to be legally married, and that common-law individuals earn less than those who are legally married, with the important exception of common-law females living in Quebec who earn more than their legally married counterparts. Males still own a marriage wage premium compared to females. In particular, the wage differential between individuals in two types of marital status is smaller in Quebec than that in the rest of Canada.