Wealth distribution within couples
Markus Grabka,
Jan Marcus and
Eva Sierminska
Review of Economics of the Household, 2015, vol. 13, issue 3, 459-486
Abstract:
While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German socio-economic panel study. In married and cohabiting couples men’s net worth, on average, is 33,000 euros higher than women’s. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, income, labor market, inheritances, financial decision-making in the partnership) that might explain this wealth gap. We find that all factors contribute to the explanation of the wealth gap within partnerships, with inheritances and income being particularly relevant. Furthermore, we find that specific characteristics (e.g., self-employment, no migration background, inheritances, high income) that decrease the wealth gap for women increase it for men. For men the respective coefficients are even stronger in absolute terms. When examining intra-partnership financial decision-making, we find the gap to be significantly smaller when the female partner manages the money and larger if the male partner has the last word in financial decisions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Keywords: Wealth gap; Wealth inequality; Intra-household allocation; Gender; Financial decision-making; SOEP; J2; D13; D31; D69; I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11150-013-9229-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Journal Article: Wealth Distribution within Couples (2015) 
Working Paper: Wealth Distribution within Couples (2013) 
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:kap:reveho:v:13:y:2015:i:3:p:459-486
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s11150-013-9229-2
Access Statistics for this article
Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard
More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().