Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores

Alberto Alesina (), Andrea Ichino and Loukas Karabarbounis

No 3233, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey’s optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. But in this paper we also explore differences in gender elasticities which emerge endogenously in a model in which spouses bargain over the allocation of home duties. GBT changes spouses’ implicit bargaining power and induces a more balanced allocation of house work and working opportunities between males and females. Because of decreasing returns to specialization in home and market work, social welfare improves by taxing conditional on gender. When income sharing within the family is substantial, both spouses may gain from GBT.

Keywords: optimal taxation; economics of gender; family economics; elasticity of labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 H21 J16 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2007-12
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp3233.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores (2007)
Working Paper: Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3233

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().