Women’s Participation in Intrahousehold Decision-making: Evidence from Italy

Carla Ronza ()

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: This paper studies the allocation of decision-making authority within households across domains. Using the Italian Survey of Consumer Expectations (ISCE), we construct a domain-specific measure of authority as the difference between women’s and men’s reported influence over each decision. We document strong domain specialization: authority is more male-leaning in financial and durable-goods decisions, while routine and childrelated choices are more female-leaning. Women’s authority rises with their income share, but the income–authority gradient steepest in high-stakes financial and durable-goods domains and flatter for routine and child-related choices. Relative education is less uniformly related to authority, with stronger gradients concentrated in finance and electronics. These patterns are robust to a couple-by-domain design with couple and domain fixed effects. Finally, the income–authority gradient is weaker among couples who use joint or mixed account arrangements, suggesting that household financial organization conditions how resources translate into authority.

Keywords: Intrahousehold decision-making; bargaining power; domain specialization. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D14 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sef:csefwp:785

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