Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households

Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan and Emir Kamenica

No 19023, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity - in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband - impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force participation, the wife's income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife's potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband's, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.

JEL-codes: J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Published as Marianne Bertrand & Emir Kamenica & Jessica Pan, 2015. "Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 130(2), pages 571-614.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19023.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households (2015)
Working Paper: Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households (2015)
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:nbr:nberwo:19023

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().