Full Citation
Title: Income Inequality and Household Labor
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2016
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Abstract: Income inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the mid 1970s. This remarkable change in the distribution of household income has spurred a great deal of research on the social and economic consequences of exposure to high inequality. However, the empirical record on the effects of income inequality is mixed. In this paper, we suggest that previous research has generally overlooked a simple but important pathway through which inequality might manifest in daily life: inequality allows women of high socio-economic status (SES) to hire lower SES women to perform domestic labor. One important venue where such dynamics might then manifest is in time spent on housework and in particular in the time divide in housework between high and low SES women. We combine micro-data from the 2003-2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) with area-level data on income inequality to show that women with a college degree and from high earning households spend increasingly less time than other women on housework in more unequal places. We further assess whether this gap can be explained by domestic outsourcing by combining micro-data from 2003- 2013 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) with area-level inequality and show that the gap in spending for household services between high and low SES households also increases in contexts of higher inequality.
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Authors: Schneider, Daniel; Hastings, Orestes P
Publisher: UC Berkeley
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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