This paper uses recorded satisfaction with household income to investigate the determinants of entitlement to household income, the resources to which individuals within a household have agreed and legitimate access, and in particular the ways in which these are gendered. We model households, as Sen (1990) suggests, as sites of cooperative conflict, wherein individuals’ satisfaction with household income has a component reflecting shared interests in household resources and a component representing a bargain over individual entitlements to those resources. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (1996-2003), matching individual answers across couples, we decompose individual satisfaction with household income into these two components. Stripping out the effects of unobserved heterogeneity through the use of fixed effects regression with carefully chosen controls, we then decompose the effect of explanatory factors on these two components into effects that are symmetric with respect to gender and those that are gendered. Our results suggest the co-existence of symmetric and gender effects both in shared views among couples and in the bargaining process which allocates men and women their entitlements to household income
Presented by:
Jerome De Henau and Susan Himmelweit (Open University)
Date & time:
February 11, 2008 4:00 pm - February 11, 2008 12:00 am
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