Overview

Abstract (English)

Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan (2015) show that among married couples in the US, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of 50%. They argue that this drop is consistent with a social norm related to gender identity prescribing that a man should earn more than his wife. We investigate this phenomenon over the years 1996 to 2011 in Canada at the national level but also across provinces where cultural values and gender norms appear to be different. We find a similar discontinuity at the 50% threshold and show that it comes from both matching patterns and time use behavior. We find that couples form less when the probability that a woman earns more than her husband increases. We also find that wives with greater probability of earning more than their husbands are less likely to participate in the labor force and that if they participate, they have a higher probability of earning less than their potential income. Finally, we find that when women exceeded the spouse’s income equality threshold, they also increased their time spent in housework, but this effect has disappeared in recent years. We find a stronger effect of gender roles in Quebec and in the Prairies but a less important effect in British-Columbia and in Ontario.

Abstract (French)

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