Does Income Taxation Affect Partners' Household Chores?

Arthur van Soest () and Elena Stancanelli

No 5038, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the impact of income taxation on both partners' allocation of time to market work and unpaid house work in households with two adults. We estimate a structural household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and house work of both partners are modelled as random coefficients, depending on observed and unobserved characteristics of the household and the two partners. We use a discrete choice model with choice sets of 2,401 points for each couple, distinguishing seven market work intervals and seven house work intervals for each partner. The model is estimated using data for France, which taxes incomes of married couples jointly, like, for instance, Germany and the US. We find that both partners’ market and non-market time allocation decisions are responsive to changes in the tax system or other policy changes that change the financial incentives. Women's time allocation is more responsive to the own and the partner’s wage rate than men's. Tax policy simulations suggest that moving from joint taxation for married couples to separate taxation of each spouse would go a small step in the direction of equalizing market and non-market work of spouses. Selective taxation with smaller tax rates for women than for men would magnify these effects.

Keywords: discrete choice models; time use; taxation; labour supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 H31 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2010-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pub
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - revised version published as 'Income taxation, labour supply and housework: A discrete choice model for French couples' in: Labour Economics, 2014, 27, 30-43

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5038.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does income taxation affect partners’ household chores? (2010)
Working Paper: Does Income Taxation Affect Partners’ Household Chores? (2010)
Working Paper: Does Income Taxation Affect Partners’ Household Chores? (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5038

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().