Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339498 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
IFS Working Papers No. 25/26
Publisher: 
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London
Abstract: 
We develop the concept of relative resource shares, defined as the fraction of total adult expenditure that women command within a household. To recover relative resource shares from expenditure data, we introduce a new identifying restriction, weak similarity of preferences across people (WSAP), a shape restriction on preferences that is weaker than those used in the existing literature. With repeated cross section data on household expenditure, we recover the relative contributions of changes in characteristics and changes in the resource share function to the evolution of relative resource shares over time. We apply this new methodology to estimate within-household gender inequality in Great Britain from 1978 to 2019. Women's relative resource shares are estimated to have increased by 12-13 percentage points over this period, rising from disparity to roughly parity with men. As a consequence, individual-level inequality rose by less than household-level inequality. We find that changes in characteristics related to women's bargaining power play a key role in explaining these changes. We document strong differences between childless women and mothers.
Subjects: 
Intra-household allocation
Individual inequality
Gender inequality
Collective household models
Relative resource shares
JEL: 
D12
D13
J16
H31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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