Abstract
This study investigates how spousal employment status affects personal employment decisions and the division of family chores. We apply Bresnahan and Reiss (J Econom 48(1):57–81, 1991) empirical cooperative game model to estimate household aggregate preference for a dual-earner family, extending their model to identify the individual preferences of husbands and wives by using the share of family chores as an empirical proxy for individual indirect disutilities. Using data from Taiwan, we show that an average household in the sample does not prefer a dual-earner family. The estimates of individual preferences indicate that this aversion comes mainly from the husbands. These results suggest that the gender gap in labor force participation and earnings has reduced at a faster rate than the social norm change toward the role of women in Taiwan.
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Notes
For example, surveys in Japan have shown that women who work full-time typically spend 30 h a week doing family chores, whereas their husbands contribute only 3 h (The Economist 2011).
Lundberg and Pollak (1993) proposed the separate spheres bargaining model by considering the traditional role of men and women as their constraints; thus, some public goods such as household chores would be provided as long as the marriage continues. This study extends their work by providing empirical estimates of the couples’ preference to the public goods and thus the size of these spheres.
Similarly, Shiu and Tang (forthcoming) adopted this framework to investigate the household joint decisions on employment and employer-provided health insurance in the USA.
For example, Chu et al. (2014) showed that a significant portion of women in Taiwanese families behave differently than their Western counterparts when making decisions concerning coresidence with in-laws, labor force participation, and birth duration.
In the collective model, \(\overline{\textit{U}}^{k}\) is considered as the bargaining position of the husband and wife besides their employment status. The bargaining power balance between husband and wife will also be affected by some distribution factors that may not be related to personal characteristics, such as social norms. In the empirical estimation section, we control bargaining position at home by controlling husbands’ and wives’ human and job characteristics. To consider the effect of distribution factors, our estimation allows exogenous shocks that would simultaneously affect the husband’s and wife’s decisions. We thank an anonymous referee for this point.
This is not an incomplete econometric model discussed in the econometric literature, such as Tamer (2003), because both equations estimate \(\delta _{3}^{h}+\delta _{3}^{w}\). Unlike the noncooperative game structure that is addressed in much of the literature, this econometric model is economically justified by a cooperative game.
This is another extension of the BR model, which allowed no time-invariant, unobservable effects.
Full descriptions of the PSFD dataset are available at http://psfd.sinica.edu.tw/. The survey data are collected annually to develop a panel data set for Chinese society. Several studies, such as Tsay and Chu (2005), have used the data to study issues related to Taiwanese families.
Originally, the data include 1507 observations in the first period of the panel but 1394 observations in the second period. A few respondents had spouses earning more than NT$1 million (US$33,400) per month, which is unrealistic, were excluded from the sample.
Results of tests of differences in means of the variables between the samples of female and male respondents are available upon request.
The household chores questions in the PSFD questionnaire are ”How many hours do you spend on household work in a week on average?” and ”How many hours does your spouse spend on household work in a week on average?”. It is not easy to describe household chores precisely, because there are several dimensions of the concept such as dusting, cleaning toilets, making beds, mowing lawns, and paying bills. Some household chores are also likely to bring positive utility such as cooking or playing with children. In this paper, we considered the variable as a proxy of individual disutility.
The Compulsory Schooling Law requires every citizen to finish elementary school.
A detailed discussion of the models appears in Sections 15.7.3 and 15.8.5 in Wooldridge (2010).
The proposed econometric method relies on the normality assumptions of error terms. Using a logarithmic functional form assures the dependent variable to satisfy the normality assumption.
We took the log of the sum of the husband’s and wife’s wages. To keep the households that reported zero income, we added 1 New Taiwan Dollar to each household.
The regression controls for the time averages of age, health status, living with parents, regional employment rates, and regional dummies. The time averages of time-invariant control variables are not included.
For example, families following the strong traditional Chinese culture might require more time from women than men on family works.
The signs of the coefficient estimates were changed because our dependent variable is a proxy for disutility (chores share). Thus, a positive coefficient estimate indicates an increase in disutility and thus a decrease in utility.
The p values for \(H_{0}:\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{2}}=0\) and \(H_{0}:\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{2}}=0\) are 0.845 and 0.511, respectively.
If we ignore the statistical insignificance, the estimates obtained from the unemployed show that \(\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{2}}=-0.020\) for the female respondents. Because \(-(\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{2}}+\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{3}})=0.056\), the estimates indicate \(\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{3}}=\)-0.056\(-\widehat{\delta ^{w}_{2}} \)=\(-0.056-(-0.020)\)=\(-0.036\) . Similarly, because \(-(\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{2}}+\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{3}})=0.087\) and \(\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{2}}=0.055\), the estimates indicate \(\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{3}}=-0.087-\widehat{\delta ^{h}_{2}} \)=-0.087-(0.055)=-0.142.
Following the previous footnote, the husband’s preference against being a dual-earner family would be nearly quadruple the wife’s if statistical significance was not considered.
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We thank the corresponding editor, Robert Kunst, an associate editor and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions to this paper. We acknowledge the support from the National Science Council of Taiwan to this research project (101-2629-H-194-003). We thank Shiuan Liou for her research assistance to this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Shiu, JL., Tang, MC. A capable wife: couple’s joint decisions on labor supply and family chores. Empir Econ 53, 827–851 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-016-1126-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-016-1126-0