and relationships, religious, institutions and networks and economic variables for the wives. Being a subset of the sample used in the previous chapter (5), the use of one of the variables has changed. The living arrangements upon marriage has previously included the categories of wife’s parents, husband parents and alone. However, the proportion in the category of wife’s parents is negligible and therefore has been combined with the category husbands’ parents. The new variable then captures living with any in-laws versus living alone.
A list of explanatory variables is selected pertaining to the husbands and used as explanatory variables in the model. The husbands’ variables are grouped into labour market variables, social network, and time allocation variables.
Table 6.3: Variables definition and summary statistics
Variable Definition Mean
(st. deviation) Living arrangement
Living with in laws =1 if the couple are currently living with either the wife’s or the husband’s parents, and =0 otherwise
0.23
Husband age The age in years. 26.58
(2.00) Age difference The age difference between the husband and
wife in years. 3.493
(2.58) HUSBANDS’ WORKING CONDITIONS
Husband’s employment sector
Private sector =1 if currently employed in the private sector, and
=0 otherwise.
0.72 Not employed =1 if currently not employed (unemployed or out
of labour force), and =0 otherwise.
0.07 Public sector =1 if currently employed in the public sector, and
=0 otherwise.
0.31 Commute time The average time in hours per day on the commute
to and from work. 0.64
(1.03)
Working hours The daily working hours. 8.44
(3.07) Husband’s earnings Annual earnings in 1000 Egyptian pounds 7.55
(8.0) HUSBANDS’ SOCIAL NETWORKS
Time spent with friends
The number of daily hours spent with friend. 0.32 (1.23) Trusting people =1 if the husband trusts people, and =0 otherwise. 0.06
HUSBANDS’ TIME ALLOCATION Chores inside the
house The number of daily hours spent on domestic
chores. 0.09
(0.45) Chores outside the
house The number of daily hours spent on chores outside
the house. 0.07
(0.29) Leisure time The number of daily hours spent on leisure
activities.
Notes to table 6.3: (a) The mean column reports the sample proportion for binary variables and means for the continuous ones. (b) The standard deviations are only reported for the non-binary variables in the dataset and are reported in parenthesis
The labour market variables for the husband are captured using four main variables that could directly or indirectly impact the wives’ marital happiness. Annual earnings, formed by transforming all the labour market earnings from daily, monthly, and quarterly into annual earnings in thousands of Egyptian pounds. The employment sector, commute time between the workplace and home as well as the number of working hours per day are also used to capture the labour market conditions of the husband.
As previously discussed, Egyptian society is known for being secretive when it comes to money, whether paid or received. Accordingly, annual earnings are considered a private matter and not easily shared with strangers. Therefore, a significant number of
missing values exist for this variable, and this is the main reason behind the drop in the number of observations reaching 539 observations.
A trade-off exists between sacrificing the missing observations and keeping such a vital variable, or sacrificing the variable and keeping the extra observations. Due to the significant role of this variable to the analysis, a decision was made to sacrifice 143 observations at the cost of keeping such a crucial variable for the analysis. However, prior to dropping these observations from the analysis, appropriate measures were taken to ensure the random selection of this group and no systematic difference between the dropped and the remaining observations are detected.
In addition to the labour market variables, and in agreement with the literature defining gaps for this topic, a time use variable for the husband is used as an explanatory variable for the self-reported marital happiness of wives. The great dispersion in the time allocation between wives and husbands is a factor to be taken into consideration. In this context, husbands spend an average 0.08 and 0.07 hours on household chores inside and outside the house, respectively. However, an average of 5 hours is spent on leisure
activities. Breaking down leisure activities into active, passive and social activities, it can be seen that the bulk of the time is spent on social activities. Based on the definition of social activity, according to the previous chapter 5 (p.91), it is considered the only form of leisure activity that involves joint activities with the wife and the family. Active and passive leisure time activities comprise only individual or parallel activities.
Pearson’s pairwise correlation between the wives’ happiness and the main covariates pertaining to the husbands are presented in table 6.4 below. Wives marital happiness is not significantly correlated with any of the husbands’ characteristics. This emphasises the previously stated hypothesis of the lack of a significant impact of the husbands’ explanatory variables on the self-reported marital happiness of wives.
Table 6.4: Pearson’s pairwise correlation coefficient of the wives’ self-reported marital happiness and selected husbands’ explanatory variables
Variables Correlation
Age -0.02
Age difference 0.04
Employment 0.02
Commute time -0.01
Working hours -0.006
Annual earnings 0.02
Time spent with friends -0.01
Trust -0.01
Leisure time -0.01
Chores inside the
household -0.03
Chores outside the
household -0.04
Notes to table 6.4: (a) ***, **, * denotes statistical significance at the 0.01, 0.05 and 0.10 level respectively
The correlations and the summary statistics lay the foundation for an analysis of the role of the husbands’ economic, institutional and time allocation variables on the
happiness of their wives. Econometric analysis, in the next section, provides a further detailed analysis of such relationships using the ordered probit model and the sub-sample of young wives selected for analysis.
6.6 Results
The model at hand estimates the impact of husbands’ characteristics, controlling for the wives’ characteristics, on the wives’ self-reported marital happiness. The sample used for analysis, is a subsample of wives within couples, where both the husbands and wives are within the age range of 15 to 29 years. Therefore, before estimating the impact of the husband characteristics, the basic model of females (model 4, table 5.8 p. 119) is re-estimated on the smaller sub-sample of observations to monitor the differences in the impact of the wives’ characteristics first before moving to the analysis of the husband’s impact.
Table 6.5: Determinants of The Marital Happiness of Wives by Wives’
Characteristics: Standard Ordered Probit
Variable Wives (15-29),
husbands (15-29)
Urban -0.13
(0.13)
Greater Cairo -0.35**
(0.15) Wives 20-24 years 0.45**
(0.2) Wives 25-29 years 0.18
(0.23) Years since marriage -0.03
(0.03)
Children 0.25
(0.31) Living arrangements
Living with in-laws -0.4***
(0.14) Nature of kinship
First cousin 0.177
(0.15)
Distant relative -0.14
(0.18) Wife asset index 0.23***
(0.09) Wife education
Less than secondary -0.08 (0.18)
Secondary 0.02
(0.18)
Post-secondary 0.06
(0.26) Less than 6 months -0.03