Estimating effect of marriage on male wages in Russia

PurposePurpose of the article is to investigate the effect of marriage on male wages in Russia. The paper provides insight about contribution of observed and unobserved factors to wages of Russian men regarding their marital status.Design/methodology/approachDatabase is the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for 2016. We add to the literature by introducing Generalized Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition of the difference in mean wages of married and unmarried men. This generalization is free of conditional mean independence assumption.FindingsWe reveal negative observed price effect and substantial positive effect of changes in unobserved characteristics of married and unmarried men in Russia.Originality/valueTo our knowledge, our study is the first one that gives estimation of the volume and structure of the male marriage wage premium in Russia. The proposed approach is applicable for estimating labor market premiums and penalties for various individual characteristics.