Disagreement in Partners' Reports of Financial Difficulty

Robert Breunig, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Xiaodong Gong () and Danielle Venn

No 1624, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We use unique data in which both partners report about household finances to demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. Four alternative explanations for this disagreement are tested using the data. The results indicate that disagreement may be related to the severity of the underlying material hardship rather than to gender differences, information asymmetries, or individual (as opposed to household) views of financial difficulty. This implies that standard surveys which collect information about the household's financial position from a representative individual may fail to completely characterize the nature of material hardship.

Keywords: household finances; survey methodology; material hardship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C42 D14 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2005-06
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Review of the Economics of the Household, 2007, 5 (1), 59-82

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Related works:
Working Paper: Disagreement in Partners’ Reports of Financial Difficulty (2006)
Working Paper: Disagreement in Partners’ Reports of Financial Difficulty (2005)
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