Household specialization and competition for promotion

Spencer Bastani, Lisa Dickmanns, Thomas Giebe and Oliver Gürtler
Additional contact information
Lisa Dickmanns: University of Cologne

Review of Economics of the Household, 2025, vol. 23, issue 1, No 5, 163 pages

Abstract: Abstract We study how the presence of promotion competition in the labor market affects household specialization patterns. By embedding a promotion tournament model in a household setting, we show that specialization can emerge as a consequence of competitive work incentives. This specialization outcome, in which only one spouse invests heavily in his or her career, can be welfare superior to a situation in which both spouses invest equally in their careers. The reason is that household specialization reduces the intensity of competition and provides households with consumption smoothing. The specialization result is obtained in a setting where spouses are equally competitive in the labor market and there is no household production. It is also robust to several modifications of the model, such as varying the number of households, two spouses competing for promotion in the same workplace, and the inclusion of household production.

Keywords: Contest theory; Gender equality; Family; Household; Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D13 J16 J71 M51 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-024-09706-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Household specialization and competition for promotion (2024)
Working Paper: Household specialization and competition for promotion (2024)
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:23:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11150-024-09706-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-024-09706-9

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 ().