About

Terra G. McKinnish is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Joint PhD from the Heinz School of Public Policy and the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, earned in 1999, as well as an M.S. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Richmond. Her research spans a variety of topics in labor economics, population economics, and urban economics, with a particular focus on labor market outcomes, marital sorting and satisfaction, and the economic impacts of demographic and policy changes. McKinnish has contributed to understanding the dynamics of wage inequality, the effects of spouse's degree fields on labor market outcomes, and the role of occupational and geographic mobility in economic behavior. Her work also explores the intersections of family economics and labor markets, including studies on marital satisfaction, spousal mobility, and the economic consequences of industry shocks such as the coal boom and bust. Through her extensive research, McKinnish has provided valuable insights into how economic and social factors influence individual and household decisions, labor market structures, and regional economic development.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Labour economics
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Demography
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Management

Selected publications

• Male Wage Inequality and Characteristics of "Early Mover" Marriages

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Male wage inequality and characteristics of “early mover” marriages

  Journal of Population Economics · 2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Male Wage Inequality and Characteristics of "Early Mover" Marriages

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Demographic economics
  • Labour economics
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• Marriage and Labor Market Outcomes

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance · 2020-01-30 · 2 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Marriage and labor market outcomes are deeply related, particularly for women. A large literature finds that the labor supply decisions of married women respond to their husbands’ employment status, wages, and job characteristics. There is also evidence that the effects of spouse characteristics on labor market outcomes operate not just through standard neoclassical cross-wage and income effects but also through household bargaining and gender norm effects, in which the relative incomes of husband and wife affect the distribution of marital surplus, marital satisfaction, and marital stability. Marriage market characteristics affect marital status and spouse characteristics, as well as the outside option, and therefore bargaining power, within marriage. Marriage market characteristics can therefore affect premarital investments, which ultimately affect labor market outcomes within marriage and also affect labor supply decisions within marriage conditional on these premarital investments.

  PublisherDOI

• Prevalence of Long Work Hours by Spouse’s Degree Field and the Labor Market Outcomes of Skilled Women

  ILR Review · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Demographic economics
  • Psychology

  Using 2009 to 2015 American Community Survey (ACS) data, this article estimates the effect of the prevalence of long hours and short hours of work in a husband’s field of work, as defined by his undergraduate degree field, on the labor market outcomes of skilled married women. When individuals work in fields that require longer hours of work, their spouses experience spillover effects. The labor market outcomes of female spouses are more negatively affected than are those of male spouses. Specifically, female spouses face lower total earnings, hourly wages, employment options, and hours of work for married women with children relative to married men with children or married women without children. Little evidence supports the idea that the rate of short hours of work in a spouse’s degree field differentially affects married women with children.

  PublisherDOI

• Locus of control and marital satisfaction: Couple perspectives using Australian data

  Journal of Economic Psychology · 2019-09-07 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Locus of Control and Marital Satisfaction: Couple Perspectives Using Australian Data

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Overwork in Spouse's Degree Field and the Labor Market Outcomes of Skilled Women

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Overwork in Spouse's Degree Field and the Labor Market Outcomes of Skilled Women

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper estimates the effect of overwork and underwork in husband's undergraduate degree field on the labor market outcomes of skilled married women using 2009-2015 ACS data. Overwork and underwork by degree field, respectively, are measured as the fraction of prime-aged men reporting 50 or more and 34 or fewer usual hours of work per week. Analysis is conducted using the sample of college-educated men and women ages 25-44 married to college-educated spouses. Results indicate that for married women with children, overwork in spouse's degree field negatively affects total earnings, hourly wages, employment and hours of work relative to married men with children or married women without children. There is little evidence that underwork in spouse's degree field differentially affects married women with children.

  OA PDF

• Locus of Control and Marital Satisfaction: Couple Perspectives Using Australian Data

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2019-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We investigate the effect of own and partner locus of control (LOC) on marital satisfaction using household longitudinal data from Australia. We also examine how the evolution of marital satisfaction over time depends on LOC. LOC indicates whether one believes that one's outcomes are more under personal control (internal LOC) or more under the control of external forces such as luck, fate or powerful others (external LOC). LOC orientation likely affects spouses' perception of marital problems and their willingness to utilize relationship-maintenance strategies when marital problems arise. We find that more internal LOC is associated with higher marital satisfaction and that own LOC matters more for marital satisfaction than spouse's LOC. Couples in which the husband is more externally oriented experience declines in marital satisfaction over time relative to couples in which the husband is more internally oriented.

  OA PDF

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03HD053860

  NIH · $152k · 2011

Frequent coauthors

• Hani Mansour

  University of Colorado Denver

  21 shared

• Kirk White

  United States Census Bureau

  12 shared

• Randall Walsh

  University of Pittsburgh

  11 shared

• Dan A. Black

  University of Chicago

  10 shared

• Seth Sanders

  Cornell University

  10 shared

• Wang-Sheng Lee

  7 shared

• T. Kirk White

  Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

  3 shared

• Hani Mansour

  National Research Centre

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1999

• M.S.

  Carnegie Mellon University

• B.A.

  University of Richmond