[2] The earliest citation of the term trailing spouse is attributed to Mary Bralove in a Wall Street Journal article in 1981 titled "Problems of Two-Career Families Start Forcing Businesses to Adapt.
Trailing spouses are a common phenomenon among military and foreign service households,[4] as well as in private sector companies with employees in different cities, states, and countries.
As the conditions of employment require a geographic relocation, the employee's spouse is faced with a major transition that includes personal and professional challenges.
Using a unitary conceptualization of the household, these models predicted that the spouse with a more discontinuous labour force participation and less market earning power (e.g. motherhood, non-market activities) has smaller gains from migration and hence is more likely to be a tied mover.
Some empirical studies in economics have later allowed for gender asymmetric migration by assigning a lower weight to the returns of the wife in the Mincer model (Foged, 2016 [12]., Krieger, 2019.