The Case for Married Men

So, apparently baseball players should stop focusing on getting hits, and should instead try to get hitched.

Researchers Francesca Cornaglia and Naomie E. Feldman conducted a research report in 2011, with samples of MLB players from 1871-2007, that yielded the veeeeerrrrry interesting result that married players earn more than single ones. This gap is precisely 16% between the wages of married players and unmarried ones.

Sure, Bryce Harper's great right now, but if he doesn't get a haircut and get married, how long can he sustain this success? (I'm kidding...sort of)

Economists have for a long time documented the "marriage premium" that married men enjoy in all professions (somewhere between 10 and 40 percent) in their wages. However, they have trouble explaining this phenomenon.

Baseball players, on the other hand, have perhaps provided us an explanation.

Since baseball is so quantitatively inclined (it has its own branch of statistics, sabermetrics, after all), Cornaglia and Feldman were able to isolate variables and produce conclusions. They measured production with stats like batting average and On-base plus Slugging (OPS), sorted players by ability (low, medium, high) and age (early and late career).

They concluded that the marriage premium (a correlation between marriage status and wage) does exist. What this entails is that within each sector (young players, old players, high-ability players, low-ability players), married men are paid more.  However, they found that marriage status has weak effect on productivity for all these players. Well, if productive players are paid more, how does marriage affect earnings?

Interestingly, in high-ability players, wives are able to extract the most economic gain from their husband's situation. This is called "direct-augmentation" by Feldman and Cornaglia, who postulate that wives of high-ability players are able to maximize sponsorships and public image as opposed to single, high-ability players. Thus, marriage directly impacts their wages.

On the other hand, low-ability players who are married benefit from "indirect-augmentation," in which wives are able to take care of the players at home and allow them to focus more on the field. Thus, marriage indirectly impacts earnings through productivity.

Furthermore, on a team-level, the success of teams (number of wins) is directly correlated with the fraction of married players on the team. This is perhaps due to the fact that marriage breeds responsibility, leadership and the ability to work as a team in players, and teams with more of these type of men will succeed.

Get a ring, to get a ring.

There is much more to read about this phenomenon in Cornaglia and Feldman's research report, and if you'd like to read it, it can be found here.