Commuter Couples and Careers: Moving Together for Him and Apart for Her

Research on the migration patterns of couples has found that men's human capital has a larger impact than women's on family location choices, but an emerging qualitative literature shows that some couples avoid location-related tradeoffs between their careers by living apart. I propose a new method of identifying couples who live apart in the American Community Survey and use the method to construct the first nationally representative sample of matched noncohabiting husbands and wives. Consistent with previous research, I find that husbands' education has a larger impact than wives' on the probability that couples migrate together. In contrast, wives' education has a larger impact on the probability that couples live apart. I argue that family location choices are analogous to marital naming choices: husbands rarely accommodate wives, whatever their circumstances, but wives accommodate husbands unless the cost of accommodation is unusually high.