Gender Inequality in Expenditure: Great Britain 1978 to 2019 

Richard Blundell (), Heidi Karjalainen, Lechene, Valérie and Krishna Pendakur

No 20543, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We develop the concept of relative resource shares, defined as the fraction of total adult expenditure that women command within a household. To recover relative resource shares from expenditure data, we introduce a new identifying restriction, weak similarity of preferences across people (WSAP), a shape restriction on preferences that is weaker than those used in the existing literature. With repeated cross section data on household expenditure, we recover the relative contributions of changes in characteristics and changes in the resource share function to the evolution of relative resource shares over time. We apply this new methodology to estimate within-household gender inequality in Great Britain from 1978 to 2019. Women's relative resource shares are estimated to have increased by 12–13 percentage points over this period, rising from disparity to roughly parity with men. As a consequence, individual-level inequality rose by less than household-level inequality. We find that changes in characteristics related to women's bargaining power play a key role in explaining these changes. We document strong differences between childless women and mothers.

Keywords: Intra-household allocation; Gender inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D13 H31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20543 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cpr:ceprdp:20543

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20543

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().