What Spousal Jealousy Can Teach Us About Labor Markets

New Paper Says....

Every December, the economics profession enters one of its most unique traditions: job market season. Ph.D. candidates release their job-market papers. This is their best work, polished to signal the kind of researcher they will become. It’s one of my favorite times of the year because we get a preview of the ideas that will likely shape journals, policy, and classrooms in the years ahead. Aniket Panjwani on X is curating a list of all job-market candidates here.

This week, one paper caught my attention.

Kailash Rajah, a Ph.D. student at MIT, released a remarkable study that asks a question most labor economists have never thought to model, let alone measure:

What if a major barrier to women’s employment is spousal jealousy?

And what if this constraint is strong enough to override wages, safety concerns, and job quality?

Rajah’s job-market paper, “The Female Labor Supply Constraints of Spousal Jealousy: Experimental Evidence from India,” is one of the most innovative empirical papers I’ve read this cycle. It uses two field experiments in Patna, India, to study how much household dynamics shape women’s work decisions. The results are powerful.

Link to the paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Aj_KkEGLvL56kBOF4KvAN2ydbPWB3gsP/view

The Economics: Labor Supply Meets Household Dynamics

Economists tend to model labor supply as a function of wages, childcare, commute time, or job safety. But Rajah shows there is another constraint we rarely quantify: male partner behavior. Specifically, does having a jealous husband impact your workforce decisions?

Experiment 1: Does the gender composition of the workplace matter?

Source: The Female Labor Supply Constraints of Spousal Jealousy: Experimental Evidence from India. Kailash Rajah.

Roughly 1,400 women were randomly assigned to a two-week job in either a mixed-gender or a women-only workplace.

The results were striking. Women offered a women-only workplace were 46% more likely to apply and 31% more likely to show up. Providing women with a 50% wage increase barely moved the labor supply decision. When researchers improved perceptions of workplace safety, application rates didn’t change.

The effects were much stronger among women who reported jealous or controlling husbands. In other words, women’s decision to work wasn’t about the job; it was about the husband.

Experiment 2: Will households pay to avoid male coworkers?

Sample: 210 married women

Women were offered a job that included a mandatory online peer support program. They could pay 20–35% of their salary to guarantee that their assigned peer was a woman.

Here’s what happened:

• 53% paid for the female peer when interactions were one-on-one.

• Demand dropped to 34% when husbands could monitor the conversations.

• A full 33% still paid to avoid even prerecorded videos featuring a male peer.

This is what Psychologists call a “distaste cost”. In this example, it is the price women pay to avoid triggering jealousy by incurring real financial losses.

How is Jealousy Measured?

The study measures spousal jealousy using a two-question index administered privately to wives. This index includes the following questions:

1. Direct report: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘My husband would be angry or jealous if I were interacting with other men at work?’”

2. Internalized norms: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement - Married women should not spend time with men outside their family?”

The index is constructed such that higher values indicate greater spousal jealousy. In the original pre-registered jealousy index, two additional measures were also included:

• The fraction of close friends and family who would find it unacceptable for married women to spend time with men outside the family.

• “When you leave the house, how often does your husband insist on knowing where you are going?” This measures controlling behavior.

Dimming Their Shine

In conversations with women, I often hear about the pressure to “dim their shine” to keep others comfortable. Rajah’s research provides empirical evidence of this kind of self-censorship. To signal a strictly platonic relationship and avoid triggering suspicion, women with more jealous husbands were significantly more likely to prefer that a hypothetical male colleague address them as “didi” (sister). This small linguistic shift becomes a strategy to manage household dynamics while navigating professional spaces. In other words, women are forced to strip away their name and identity to allows their husbands to feel more secure.

The Bottom Line

This research is a powerful reminder that wages and policies don’t just shape labor markets. They’re shaped by homes, marriages, norms, and emotions, all the messy human parts of economic life that our models often simplify away.

Three takeaways:

1. Human behavior belongs in our labor equations. Constraints like jealousy operate in the background but have measurable economic consequences.

2. Policies that expand women-only workspaces may boost labor supply more than wage increases, at least in contexts where household constraints dominate.

3. New economists are pushing the field forward. Papers like Rajah’s show how the next generation is expanding what counts as “economic behavior.”

If this is the kind of work emerging from the job market, the future of economics is bright and far more human.

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