This is a past event
HERU Seminar - Gender role identity, breadwinner status and psychological well-being in the household.
Dr Heather Brown, Lecturer in Health Economics at the Institute of Health and Society, University if Newcastle, will present on 'Gender role identity, breadwinner status and psychological well-being in the household'.
Abstract:
It is only recently that the psychological concept of identity has entered economic discourse. This paper is concerned with an important aspect of identity that of gender roles within couples. We explore the extent to which compliance with this identity influences individual utility. We consider gender roles and attitudes in a longitudinal sample from the British Household Panel Survey, within a pseudo fixed effects framework that controls for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals. Our work offers some support for Akerlof and Kranton’s (2000) identity model. Women in ‘traditional’ marriages who accept this role have improved utility. Men in couples where the wife is the main breadwinner have improved utility if they have accepted this swapping of roles, but reduced utility if they have not. Our results have implications for the validity of traditional household bargaining models which are largely gender neutral.
- Speaker
- Dr Heather Brown
- Venue
- IMS Building, Level 7