A growing body of literature suggests that the outsourcing of household chores and caring responsibilities is increasingly used by couples as a strategy for more effectively combining work and family life. In the outsourcing process households contract out functions that were previously done in-house to commercial or public-sector service providers. The difficulties facing couples, especially women, in balancing work and family responsibilities affect both their fertility and their employment characteristics. Policy initiatives taken by welfare states seeking to raise low fertility are often aimed at decreasing this role incompatibility, especially by allowing women to maintain their careers while bringing up children (e.g., through longer maternity leave with protection against dismissal, access to affordable childcare, shorter working hours, part-time or flexible jobs, etc.). Apart from being themselves providers of childcare services, some governments also actively encourage households to outsource other tasks, such as housework, in order to reduce women's role incompatibility and allow them to join the labor force.The commercial sector also provides households with services that were once performed within families. In the "new" service economy, families in effect externalize certain aspects of household production, such as childcare, food preparation, and cleaning, and purchase these services in commercial markets. As Esping-Andersen (2009) has noted, a century ago service consumption was mostly driven by demand from privileged rich groups within society, while today's demand is more widely spread through the population. The supply side also plays a part: growing numbers of low-wage workers, many of them poorly protected immigrants, provide a pool of potential service workers (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001).

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Using both an analysis of the effect of lagged economic and current educational characteristics, as well as an analysis of the life-course changes in these characteristics, this study provides insights into the theoretical debate concerning the relationships between men's and women's economic activity levels and the transition to first marriage. Our findings support the men's economic stability hypothesis, the search hypothesis, and the income-pooling hypothesis. The results also support the women's economic independence hypothesis, but only to a certain degree. For men, we find a positive effect of employment stability and a positive effect of earnings, which increase over time. For women, the effect of salary has an inverse U-shape, and employment stability has a positive effect on marriage. Over the life course, we find that men who have a continuum of stable employment have the highest odds of first marriage, while women tend to reduce their economic activity in anticipation of or following marriage. Moreover, we find that marriage is postponed for at least two years after the completion of education.

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