Tax-Benefit Systems and the Gender Gap in Income

Karina Doorley and Claire Keane ()

No 13786, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The gender wage gap and the gender work gap are sizable, persistent and well documented for many countries. The result of the gender wage and gender work gap combined is an income gap between men and women. A small literature has begun to examine how the tax-benefit system contributes to closing gender income gaps by redistributing between men and women. In this paper, we study the effect of tax-benefit policy on gender differences in income. We use microsimulation models linked to survey data to estimate gender gaps in market income (before taxes and transfers) and disposable income (after taxes and transfers) for each country. We develop a method to isolate the relative contributions of the gender wage gap and the gender work gap to the overall gap in income between men and women. We then decompose the difference between the gender gap in market income and the gender gap in disposable income into (i) the relative contribution of taxes and benefits in each country and (ii) the relative cushioning of the gender wage gap and gender work gap. Policy conclusions are drawn about redistribution between men and women.

Keywords: tax-benefit system; decomposition; gender inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-lma and nep-pub
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Inequality, 2024, 22, 285 - 309

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13786.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tax-benefit systems and the gender gap in income (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:iza:izadps:dp13786

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().