Philipp Lersch és Professor Titular de Sociologia i Política Social a la Humboldt University i Investigador al German Institute for Economic Research, Berlín (Alemanya).

Abstract.- This study examines the accumulation of personal wealth of women and men in marriage and investigates the development of within-couple wealth inequalities over time. Going beyond previous research that mostly studied household-level wealth and did not examine over-time variation in the marriage wealth premium, we argue that entry into marriage is a major life course event that uniquely shapes husbands’ and wives’ wealth accumulation in the following years. Using high-quality data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (2002, 2007, and 2012), we apply random-effects and fixed-effects regression models to describe wealth accumulation within married couples. We find a delayed marriage wealth premium about five years after entering marriage compared to the never married. We find that the premium is mostly concentrated in housing wealth compared to financial wealth. We find a pronounced within-couple total wealth gap at the start of the marriage, which is stable over time. We find some preliminary evidence that casts doubt on whether the marriage wealth premium is causal for men.