What if women earned more than their spouse? An experimental investigation of work division in couples

Francois Cochard (), Hélène Couprie () and Astrid Hopfensitz
Additional contact information
Francois Cochard: CRESE - Centre de REcherches sur les Stratégies Economiques (UR 3190) - UFC - Université de Franche-Comté - UBFC - Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté [COMUE]

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized to explain this fact. We experimentally investigate work division by true co-habiting couples participating in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the "advantaged" player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which correspond to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. We show that women do not contribute more than men to the household public good whatever the situation. This result allows us to rule-out some of the standard explanations of the work division puzzle.

Keywords: Experiment on couples; Time allocation; Work division (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01376912v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01376912v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What if women earned more than their spouses? An experimental investigation of work-division in couples (2018)
Working Paper: What if women earned more than their spouse? An experimental investigation of work-division in couples (2018)
Working Paper: What if women earned more than their spouses? An experimental investigation of work-division in couples (2017)
Working Paper: What if women earned more than their spouses? An experimental investigation of work-division in couples (2017)
Working Paper: What if women earned more than their spouse? An experimental investigation of work division in couples (2015)
Working Paper: What if women earned more than their spouse? An experimental investigation of work division in couples (2015)
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:wpaper:hal-01376912

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().