Intra-household Gender Inequality, Welfare, and Economic Development

Deepak Malghan () and Hema Swaminathan ()

No 34, LWS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: Differences in economic outcomes between men and women within a household, or intra-household gender inequality has suffered from relative neglect despite a renewed focus on gender inequality. Using global micro-data from nearly three million house-holds, we present evidence that this neglect renders our understanding of the relation-ship between gender inequality and economic development analytically and empirically incomplete. We show that intra-household gender inequality in earnings is persistent across the income distribution, across a wide range to countries, and over four-decades. For a sub-sample of countries, we show that the relationship between intra-household gender inequality and household economic status is non-monotonic – that we refer to as the “micro-Kuznets” relationship. We also develop an empirical framework to mea-sure the aggregate welfare loss from intra-household gender inequality. For a range of plausible inequality aversion assumptions, we report an median welfare loss of over 15% of aggregate earnings.

JEL-codes: D10 D63 I31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-gen, nep-hme, nep-isf and nep-upt
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Published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 189, 515-546 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.07.022)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lis:lwswps:34

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