Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores

Alberto Alesina (), Andrea Ichino and Loukas Karabarbounis

No 13638, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. We study GBT in a model in which, instead, elasticity differences emerge endogenously from the bargained allocation of family duties. We explore two polar cases, which summarize the channels through which GBT affects an economy encompassing a wider set of possible reasons for gender differences. In the first case, the allocation of family chores is uneven between spouses because men have a superior bargaining power. In the second, instead, women take up more chores because they have a comparative advantage in household activities. We show how GBT emerges as an optimal policy tool as result of the interaction between incentives within the family and the Ramsey criterion, which is internalized by the government but not by household members.

JEL-codes: D13 H21 J16 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-pbe
Date: 2007-11
Note: LS PE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13638.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

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:nbr:nberwo:13638

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13638
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

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