The influence of gender and income on the household division of financial responsibility

Marcin Hitczenko

No 16-20, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: This paper studies how gender and income dynamics influence the division of responsibility in two-adult households for various activities, including those tasks directly related to financial decisionmaking. The data, from the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, consist of the respondents? categorical self-assessments of their individual levels of responsibility for various tasks. A data construct, in which some households have both adults participate in the survey, is exploited to develop a penalized latent variable model that accounts for systemic response errors. The data reveal that that women, even when they are the primary earner, are much more likely than men to have the major responsibility for household shopping and bill paying. With regard to financial decisionmaking, however, there is a greater propensity to share responsibility equally, and income ranking is more important than gender in defining household roles, with higher earners more likely to have a larger share of responsibility.

Keywords: gender roles; household finances; probit models; penalized maximum likelihood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 C51 D13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2016-10-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-de ... -responsibility.aspx Summary (text/html)
https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/Workingpapers/PDF/wp1620.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedbwp:16-20

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Spozio ().