Marriage Stability and Private Versus Shared Expenditures Within Families: Evidence from Japanese Families
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Marriage Stability and Private Versus Shared Expenditures Within Families: Evidence from Japanese Families Xiangdan Piao1 Accepted: 15 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Previous studies have identified the negative impacts of an increase in the proportion of a wife’s income to the couple’s combined income, as well as of the gap in housework/ childcare, on the stability of a marriage, increasing the likelihood of divorce. However, the intrahousehold mechanism is still inconclusive in terms of this issue. In the present study, we investigated a potential alternative mechanism, following the gender identity framework and the collective model and using longitudinal survey data from 1993 to 2015 from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC). The findings showed that an increase in a wife’s share of the couple income increased her relative bargaining power and had a significant influence on intrahousehold reallocations of income/time. These intrahousehold reallocations, in turn, had a negative impact on the stability of the marriage. In couples with high-income wives, the husbands transferred their incomes to their wives, and the wives undertook the majority of the housework. In other words, a higher housework burden among wives was associated with regular income transfers from husbands to wives. Meanwhile, despite increases in wives’ income shares, both husbands and wives contributed to the family through reallocations of income/time in order to maintain marriage stability. Keywords Intrahousehold allocation · Marriage stability · Japan · Longitudinal data · Gender identity JEL Classification D13 · J12 · J16
* Xiangdan Piao [email protected]; [email protected]‑u.ac.jp 1
Urban Institute and Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishi‑ku, Fukuoka 819‑0395, Japan
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1 Introduction In the past few decades of economic and social development, the family has also undergone changes. For example, the number of divorced couples has been increasing over the past five decades, and in 2005 the ratio of divorced to married couples reached around 3:10, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (2009). As for women’s labor participation, the number of dual-earner couples is increasing.1 Additionally, the wife’s income share (wife’s income/couple income) is also expected to rise. However, previous studies found that when a wife’s income share increases, the wife still undertakes more housework; family conflicts are more likely to occur, and the partners’ satisfaction with their marriage decreases (Baxter and Tai 2016; Ma and Piao 2019; Yamamura and Tsutsui 2019). Similar issues have also been identified in Western countries (Baxter and Tai 2016; Bertrand et al. 2015; Killewald 2016). A conclusive solution for balancing marriage with an increasing proportion of wife’s income to couple income has yet to be found (Fig. 1). Scholars have established, from the perspective of gender identity,
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