New spouse, same chores? The division of household labor in consecutive unions

Miriam Beblo and Anne Solaz ()
Additional contact information
Miriam Beblo: UHH - Universität Hamburg = University of Hamburg

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This article investigates domestic sphere investments, that is, housework and childcare time, of spouses in two consecutive relationships and aims to identify potential sources of variation. Economic reasoning would predict a learning effect from one partnership to the next, and hence less specialization in the domestic sphere in the second relationship. Prevailing gender norms or institutions, on the contrary, may prevent such adjustments in the division of housework. In a fixed-effects regression analysis with the German SocioEconomic Panel, we compare time allocations of couples whose members experienced two consecutive partnerships from 1991 to 2012. Our results indicate that women's and men's successive matches differ from each other. Women and their new partners tend to reallocate time from housework to childcare while men's individual domestic investment patterns remain similar across unions. Highly educated women conform most to the economic rationale by reducing their marital investments significantly in their next partnership.

Keywords: childcare; household chores; Domestic work; gender; Germany; German socio-economic panel data; divison of domestic labour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01892938v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Socio-Economic Review, inPress, ⟨10.1093/ser/mwy014⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01892938v1/document (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:hal:journl:hal-01892938

DOI: 10.1093/ser/mwy014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().