WUNRN
By Elena Stancanelli [20-03-2009]
Domestic chores and paid work are unequally distributed between
men and women. Elena Stancanelli shows that the taxation system has an impact
on the allocation of chores between spouses. Joint taxation system discourages
wives who earn much less than their husbands from working. Moving to a separate
taxation system would tend to equalize the time devoted to professional
activities and domestic work between spouses.
Almost
every day we carry out some domestic tasks: we shop for food; we cook; we set
and unset the table; we wash up the dishes; we do the laundry; and we take care
of children. Some also go out to work for pay in the market.
The conventional economic model assumes that individuals
arbitrate between working for pay in the market or enjoying time off-work. All
the time off-work is considered as “pure enjoyment”, ie “leisure”, in the
economist jargon. One of the first economists to realize that time off work was
not all “pure enjoyment” or “leisure” is Becker, who received the Nobel prize
in economics in 1992. [1] But Becker cannot be credited for having paid
a lot of attention to household chores. One of the first economists to study
the time individuals allocate to domestic tasks is Gronau [2], who focused on how married men and women
shared their time between market work and domestic work. Recent studies point
out that one should go further and distinguish non-market time across different
activities like, in particular, domestic tasks and childcare [3]. The standard economic model is about a
“rational” individual taking “economic” decisions. This standard model not only
ignores household chores, but also it does not take into account that
individuals may be part of a larger household and their decisions may not be
independent from each other. One of the first economists to put forward an
economic model for the household as a whole rather than the individual was Becker
back in the sixties. The current literature in this area has developed fast and
it now considers couple households as made up of two individuals, each with his
own utility function [4]. Let us consider a couple with children and
assume that their household income would increase -for example, because of a
promotion or some inheritance. Will they use part of the extra money to buy
more cleaning services, or rather to eat out more often? Economic policies like
equality of opportunity or income taxation affect men and women’s employment
prospects and the rewards from work and may thus also impact on how spouses
share on paid and unpaid work. The research I am surveying here analyzes how
household income and wages affect the time that spouses dedicate to paid work,
domestic tasks and childcare [5].
Figure 1 provide some information on how men and women all over
Europe divide their time between market work, domestic work and “leisure” (see
Figure 1). Here domestic work is broadly defined to include also time spent
caring for children. Leisure includes activities like going out, doing sports,
watching television and similar uses of time. In Figure 1, we see that in most
countries, the amount of market work performed by women is very close to that
of domestic work done by men. Now, this European sample includes individuals
aged up to seventy years, and also includes week days and weekend days. So we
find that on average time spent in paid work by men is roughly 4 hours per
week; and time spent doing domestic work by women is about the same. Men enjoy
on average more leisure time than women do.
Let us then look at how spouses share on paid and unpaid work in
France [6]. Here we only consider people aged up to
sixty years and average their time over week days, excluding the weekend. We separate
childcare –defined as time spent feeding the children, dressing them, bathing
them, walking them somewhere, helping them with homework and playing with them
– from domestic work which includes activities like shopping, cleaning, doing
the laundry, washing up the dishes, doing paperwork and going to administrative
offices. We also analyze time spent on domestic work by adopting a broader
definition of domestic work –denoted as “domestic work*” in Table 1- which
includes in addition to the preceding list of activities also time spent taking
out pets, doing the garden, doing jams, knitting and sewing.
We find that women dedicate more time to domestic work and
childcare than men; while the opposite holds for paid work, husbands do the
bulk of it. A typical French husband (equivalent to the median of the
distribution) works 8 hours per day, while the typical French wife is a
housewife and works then zero hours for pay (see Table 1 below). Instead, the
typical French wife spends one hour per day taking care of children (here we
look at children of all ages up to eighteen) and over three hours doing
domestic work. Her husband devotes no time to the children and twenty minutes
to domestic work. If we adopt a different, broader, definition of domestic work
(domestic work*), we see that the typical husband would spend one hour a day
doing unpaid domestic work. This clearly pictures a very unequal balance of
paid and unpaid work carried out by husbands and wives.
Median, or typical, behavior of course hides that people are
very different from each other. In Table 2, we show what part of, respectively,
domestic work, childcare and paid work is carried out by the husband. First, we
have summed together the total time spent by husband and wife on each given
task; and, next, we have calculated what fraction of the total paid work,
domestic work and childcare done by the couple is carried out by the husband.
For example, assume that the husband works 8 hours per day and the wife zero
hours. The total paid work time for that couple is 8 hours, and the husband in
that couple carries out all (100%) of that. In Table 2, we read that the median
husband (located at 50% of the distribution of husbands) does all (100%) of
paid work done by the couple; and about one tenth of the childcare (to be
precise, 12%) and the domestic work (to be precise, 13%) provided by the
couple. Using a broader definition of domestic work, we see that the median
husband does about a quarter (26%) of all the domestic work done by the couple.
Let us now look at the part of domestic work and childcare
carried out by men that are further away from typical behavior (so far from the
50% of the distribution of husbands). The bottom decile of men (10% in the
first column denoted “husbands’ population”) do half of the paid work carried
out by the couple; so in, say, about one every ten couples, the husband and the
wife share equally on paid work. But on the other hand, we also see that some
husbands do not contribute at all to domestic work and childcare in their
household, and these are all carried out only by their wife. If we move up to
the ninth deciles (90% in the first column denoted “husbands’ population”),
husbands are doing half of the domestic work carried out by the couple (51%).
So there again, we see that in say one every ten couples husbands do the same
amount of childcare and domestic tasks as their wives do. So there are some
husbands that share equally in the amount of unpaid tasks carried out by the
household but they are a minority of the population of husbands.
Our research focuses in particular on the effects of wages and
income on the time dedicated to household tasks by spouses [7]. We specify three time-use choices -paid
work, childcare, and housework- and we find that parents’ paid working time
increases if the person’s own wage is higher. Instead, the time dedicated to
domestic work falls if the person’s own wage increases. Interestingly, the time
spent with children is not found to vary if the person’s own wage changes.
Next, we conclude that domestic and parental time of women is independent of
(does not vary with) the wage of their husband. On the contrary, domestic work
and time dedicated to children by fathers will increase if their wife’s wage
increases. We also conclude that if the non-labour household income increases
–this includes rents, dividends, welfare, other transfers- parents will spend
more time in unpaid activities, like childcare and domestic work and less time
in paid work. Our results also indicate that higher educated parents spend more
time with their children than lower educated people do. And that married women
spend more time doing domestic work than cohabiting women do.
In a related paper, we analyze the impact of taxation on the
spouses’ allocation of time to paid and unpaid work [8]. Theoretical economic work on the optimal
taxation of couples shows that household chores should be accounted for [9]. In particular, the taxation of the rewards
from work may affect not only on the time that spouses allocate to market work
but also the time devoted to household chores. Take, for example, two
households with identical total earnings, no other income and the same number
of children; where the first couple consists of dual-earners and the second
one, of a male-breadwinner and a housewife. This last can devote more time to
household tasks than the dual-earners, and, thus, their “full income” -which
includes monetary income and also domestic production-will be larger than that
of the dual-earners. Indeed, the dual-earners will have either to give up some
of their leisure time to perform household chores or to buy household services
from the market. Under a joint taxation system of spouses, like the one
currently in place in the United States or in France, the two households will
bear the same tax burden. It follows the joint taxation implicitly rewards the
male-breadwinner household. Under separate taxation, instead, the incomes of
the husband and the wife are not summed up for tax purposes, but everyone pays
their income tax as if they were single people.
Joint taxation is generally considered to be advantageous also
for dual-earner spouses with large earnings differences -where he earns much
more than she does- as it brings down his tax rate by more than it increases
hers. In particular, if the husband makes much more money than his wife, the
tax rate on his earnings will be lower than if he were not married; while her
tax rate will be higher than if she were a single woman. It follows that under
join taxation, women with earnings much lower than their husband may be
discouraged from working at all-as if they withdraw from the labour market, the
couple will pay much less taxes, which may become financially more advantageous
than paying for babysitting for example.
Indeed, our simulations [10] suggest that moving from joint taxation of
married couples to a system of separate taxation of the incomes of the spouses
would, on the one hand, increase the time that married men devote to household
chores, and decrease their paid work time; and, on the other side, increase
married women’s market work and decrease their supply of unpaid household work.
Thus, we find that moving from joint taxation to separate taxation would go in
the direction of equalizing market and non-market work of husbands and wives.
by
Elena
Stancanelli [20-03-2009]
[1] See
Becker, G. S. (1965), “A Theory of the Allocation of Time”, The Economic
Journal, Vol. 75, No. 299, p. 493-517.
[2] See
Gronau, R. (1976), "Leisure, Home Production and Work. The theory of the
allocation of time revisited”, NBER Working paper No. 137, May.
[3]
See: Kooreman, P. and Kapteyn, A. (1987), “A disaggregated analysis of the
Allocation of Time within the Household”, The Journal of Political Economy,
Vol. 95, No. 2, pp. 223-249.
Kimmel J. and Connelly R. (2007), “Mothers’ Time Choices.
Caregiving, Leisure, Home Production, and Paid Work”, The Journal of Human
Resources, vol. XLII (3), p. 643-681.
[4] For
a review of the literature, see Sofer C. (2004) « Les choix relatifs au travail
dans la famille : modélisations économiques des décisions du ménage et
applications », Travail et Emploi, n° 102, pp 79-89.
To go further, see papers from a workshop we organized at Nice
in June 2008
[5]
See: Hersch J. and Stratton L. (1994), “Housework, and the Division of
Housework Time for Employed Spouses”, The American Economic Review,
vol.84 (2), p. 120-125. Kalenkoski C., Ribar D. and Stratton L. (2008), “The
Influence of Wages on Parents’ Time Allocation of Time to Child Care and Market
Work in the United Kingdom”, Journal of Population Economics,
forthcoming. Connelly R. and Kimmel J. (2007), “Spousal Influences on Parents’
Non-Market Time Choices”, IZA DP No. 2894
[6]
See: Rapoport, B., Sofer, C. et Solaz, A. (2009) « Household Production in a
Collective Model: Some New Results » Journal of Population Economics,
forthcoming.
Anxo, D. , Flood L. , Letizia Mencarini, L., Pailhé, A. , Solaz
A. and Tanturri, M. L. (2007), “Time Allocation between Work and Family over
the Life-Cycle: A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the
United States,” IZA Discussion Papers 3193.
[7]
See: Bloemen, H. and Stancanelli, E. (2008), “How do parents allocate time: the
effects of wages and income”, IZA DP No. 3679.
[8] See
van Soest, A. and Stancanelli, E. (2008), “Income Taxation, household chores
and spouses’ labour supply: a discrete choice model for French couples”, mimeo,
December 2008 Tilburg University.
[9]
See:
Boskin, M. J. (1975), “Efficiency aspects of the differential
tax treatment of market and household economic activity”, Journal of Public
Economics, 4, 1-25.
Apps. P. (1982), “Institutional inequality and tax incidence”, Journal
of Public Economics, Vol. 18, pp. 217-242.
Apps, P. F. and Rees, R. (1988), “Taxation and the Household”, Journal
of Public Economics, 35, 155-169.
Apps, P. F. and Rees, R. (1999a), “The Taxation of trade within
and between households”, Journal of Public Economics, 73, 241-263.
Apps, P. F. and Rees, R. (1999b), “Joint vs individual taxation
in models of household production”, Journal of Political Economy, 107,
393-403.
Sandmo, A. (1990), « Tax Distortions and Household Production »,
Oxford Economic Papers, 42, 1, 78-90.
[10]
See van Soest, A. and Stancanelli, E. (2008), “Income Taxation, household
chores and spouses’ labour supply: a discrete choice model for French couples”,
mimeo, December 2008 Tilburg University.
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