My Baby Takes the Morning Train: Gender Identity, Fairness, and Relative Labor Supply Within Households

Anthony Lepinteur, Sarah Flèche and Nattavudh Powdthavee

No 10382, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The current study argues that women's decision to leave the labor force at the point where their income exceeds their husbands' income may have less to do with gender identity norm (Bertrand et al., 2015) and more to do with what women think is a fair distribution of relative working hours within the household. Using three nationally-representative data, we show that life satisfaction is significantly lower among women whose work hours exceed their partners, holding the share of wife's income constant. Men, by contrast, are not affected by working longer or fewer hours than their wives.

Keywords: fairness; gender identity; life satisfaction; relative income; working hours; labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hap, nep-hme, nep-lab and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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