Arbeitspapier
Preferences over Relative Income within the Household
What preferences do partners hold over their relative income within the household? We provide a flexible framework of preferences over relative income within the household that captures various motives, including inequality aversion and a preference for being the primary earner. We study the role of these preferences for marital selection, separation and household public good provision in a marriage market matching model with search frictions. We test the model predictions using large administrative tax data from Germany. We document the existence of a kink point in the relative income distribution at the point of spousal income equality, consistent with the presence of kinked preferences over relative income. We also find the presence of a convex kink in wives' household public good provision, suggesting that women bear the incidence of spousal relative income preferences. To disentangle the preferences of women and men, we implement a survey experiment. Our results indicate that women exhibit inequality aversion while men exhibit a preference for being the primary earner.
- Language
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Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
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Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16803
- Classification
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Wirtschaft
Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡
Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- Subject
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relative income concerns
relative income distribution
- Event
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Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Hermle, Johannes
Herold, Elena
Hildebrand, Nikolaus
- Event
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Veröffentlichung
- (who)
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Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
- (where)
-
Bonn
- (when)
-
2024
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Hermle, Johannes
- Herold, Elena
- Hildebrand, Nikolaus
- Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Time of origin
- 2024
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