Change in Spousal Human Capital and Housework: A Longitudinal Analysis

Abstract

We bring a novel, longitudinal, perspective to an ongoing series of influential papers that investigates the relationship between housework, marital bargaining, and spousal resources. For the first time, we believe, in this long debate, we combine a longitudinal perspective with a measure of resources—human capital—that provides an indicator of the likely economic bargaining power of the non-employed, thereby enabling their inclusion in analysis. We use longitudinal fixed-effects models to address the relationship between housework hours and spousal resources based on yearly couples’ data from the nationally representative British Household Panel Study (N = 6,541 couples). Using the measure of human capital, we find change in wives’ own human capital to be the most important factor determining housework for both spouses, and no evidence for gender deviance neutralization. We conclude it is women’s resources that are the critical determining factor in bargaining over housework.

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