 Who holds the purse strings within the household? The determinants of intra-family decision makingGraziella Bertocchi (), Marianna Brunetti and Costanza Torricelli Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2014, vol. 101, issue C, 65-86 Abstract: We study the determinants of intra-household decision-making responsibility over economic and financial choices using a direct measure provided in the 1989–2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We find that the probability that the wife is responsible for decisions increases as the wife's characteristics in terms of age, education and income become closer or even higher than those of her husband's. Thus, consistently with a bargaining approach, decision-making responsibility is associated with marriage heterogamy, and not only along strictly economic dimensions. However, in support of an alternative household production approach, we also find that the probability that the wife is responsible is lower when she is employed, which suggests the presence of a specialization pattern assigning responsibility to the spouse with more available time. Our results are robust to additional controls and alternative samples. Keywords: Family economics; Intra-household decision making; Gender differences; Financial choices (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:101:y:2014:i:c:p:65-86 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2014.02.012 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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