Spousal Bargaining Power: Decoupling Gender Norms and Earning Status

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Isaac, Elliott
Copyright Year	2019
Abstract	The collective model provides a spousal bargaining framework of household labor supply, but most empirical studies assume that husbands bargain with wives, leaving unclear the extent to which gender norms surrounding labor supply interact with empirical estimates. I estimate collective labor supply models for different-sex and same-sex married couples in order to quantify the role of gender norms in spousal bargaining as distinct from that of earning status within the couple. I find that wives in differentsex couples have a significantly larger Pareto weight on their utility relative to their husbands, but I find no significant evidence that gender norms affect spousal bargaining power within the couple. My findings suggest that observable differences between men’s and women’s intensive margin labor supplies in different-sex couples are not significantly influenced by traditional gender norms within the couple, but may be influenced by external factors, such as the gender wage gap, that create different likelihoods that a man or woman is the primary earner in their household. Ongoing work includes extending the present analysis to include labor force participation decisions. JEL: J16, J22, D10
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/JuniorSenior_2020/isaac_a18386.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article