Frances Woolley

Control over Money in Marriage

The basic question addressed in this chapter is “Who gets what in a marriage?” I begin with the observation that any marriage involves two individuals, each of whom has their own experience of that marriage. The focus is on the economic outcomes experienced by each partner, and the influences on those outcomes. Which partner has greater control over the family’s finances? Which partner’s preferences are represented in family consumption decisions? Much of the current research on this issue, which uses family expenditure data, encounters a severe limitation: there are very few consumption items which can unambiguously be assigned to men, women or children. This paper answers the question “who gets what?” in a novel way. I use data on how families manage their finances, to find out who has access to, who manages and who controls the family finances. I also explore the determinants of financial control. Does an improvement in one spouse’s bargaining position lead to greater control over money, or is control over money simply party of the couple’s division of labor? The study is based on a new a survey of families with children in the Ottawa-Hull area carried out by the author. The paper begins with a survey of recent developments in the study of intra-household resource allocation. What do we know about how resources are allocated inside households? What do we know about why the pattern of household resources is as it is? I then go on to describe the data set used in the research, and the main empirical findings. I do not find a systematic pro-male or pro-female bias in household finances. However I do find that, as predicted by theory, partners with greater incomes have greater control over money, younger spouses do better, and there is less income pooling when one partner, especially the man, has been married before.

Getting the better of Becker

This paper identifies three ways in which feminist economists can reclaim the economic discourse on the family from the new home economics and, in so doing, “get the better of Becker”: first, take what is useful from Beckers analysis, use it to advocate policies to improve the status of women, and discard the rest; second, develop alternatives - preferably feminist alternatives - to Beckers analysis; third, discover the features of the economics profession which have led to acceptance of Beckers more dubious analyses, and try to change those features.

THE CITATION IMPACT OF FEMINIST ECONOMICS

Abstract Feminist economics is a transformative project. However, transformation generates resistance. Feminist economics can be deliberately excluded, co-opted through an uncritical application of rational choice theory, or ignored. And feminist economics can be listened to: when the United Nations consults feminist economists; when feminist economists publish in widely read journals; when a student finds inspiration in a Feminist Economics article. All of these are ways feminist economics can, and has, influenced the profession. After ten years of discourse, it is possible to take stock and assess the impact of feminist economics. This article provides a partial assessment through a consideration of citations of the journal Feminist Economics, describing its impact on mainstream economics, heterodox economics, and other disciplines. While the overall project of feminist economics encompasses much more than just one journal, studying the citations for Feminist Economics is a first step toward assessing the influence of the entire corpus.

The evolution of male-female earnings differentials in Canadian universities,1970–2001

In this paper, we use a unique data set containing detailed information on all full-time teachers at Canadian universities over the period 1970 through 2001. The individual level data are collected by Statistics Canada from all universities in Canada and are used to analyze the evolution of male-female wage differentials of professors in Canadian universities. The long time series aspect of this data source along with the detailed administrative information allow us to provide a more complete and more accurate portrait of the wage gap than is available in most other studies. The results of a cohort-based analysis indicate that the male salary advantage among university faculty has declined for more recent birth cohorts. This has been driven not so much by an increase in the real salaries of female professors but from a cross cohort decline in the earnings of male professors and the fact that female professors have not experienced a similar cross cohort decline. Also important to note is the fact that the differences across cohorts appear to be permanent. There is no clear pattern of changes in these cohort differences with age.

Ending Universality: The Case of Child Benefits

The paper evaluates the 1993 child tax benefit reforms using the Social Policy Simulation Model and Database (SPSD/M) developed by Statistics Canada. The paper argues that few of the benefits of the reform went to the poorest families. Instead, because of the interaction of the tax and benefit system, the greatest net beneficiaries were lower-middle income families in the

Degrees of Connection: A Critique of Rawls's Theory of Mutual Disinterest

40,000 to

Reply to Frederic Lee's Comment on “The Citation Impact of Feminist Economics”

50,000 income range. The paper also evaluates the effectiveness of the earned income supplement in increasing incentives to participate in the labour market. It argues that, because of tax back provisions, the earned income supplement results, on average, in an increase in marginal tax rates for Canadian families. Moreover, even when the earned income supplement decreases marginal tax rates, it will have only the most minimal effects on labour force participation.

Taxation and Gender Equity: A Comparative Analysis of Direct and Indirect Taxes in Developing and Developed Countries, edited by Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia. New York: Routledge, 2010. 352 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-49262-1 (hbk.). US

John Rawlss solution to the problem of justice between generations is premised on the idea that “a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers say care for their sons” (John Rawls 1971: 288, emphasis added). This paper brings mothers into the Rawlsian social contract. I argue that, when children have more than one parent, there is a contradiction between the assumption of concern for descendants, which underpins Rawlss account of justice between generations, and the mutual disinterest assumption, which characterizes parties negotiating in the “original position.” Concern for descendants creates connections within generations as well as across generations. The critique is internal and nonradical, but its implications are subversive. It demonstrates that an “add women and stir” liberal feminist reworking of Rawlss theory cannot be successful; bringing sexual reproduction out of the realm of nature and into the social contract necessitates a radical reconstruction of Rawlss theory.

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Abstract This essay is a response to “A Comment on the Citation Impact of Feminist Economics,” by Frederic Lee, which appears in this issue ofFeminist Economics. Frederic Lees comment is a valuable addition to our understanding of the intellectual interactions between feminist economics and other schools of heterodox thought, and demonstrates how much can be learned by studying citation patterns.

A Cournot–Nash Model of Family Decision Making

Tax systems are gendered. For example, if tobacco and alcohol are disproportionately consumed by men, men might pay a relatively high share of any taxes on these goods. Personal income tax systems sometimes contain explicit gender biases, such as the Moroccan tax system’s stipulation that fathers claim deductions for children unless the mother is able to prove legally that she supports her children financially. At other times, the bias is implicit. For example, Ghana provides preferential tax treatment for income derived from certain crops such as cassava, maize, and rice. If the crops eligible for preferred tax status are disproportionately grown by men, the tax system will be implicitly biased in their favor. Detailed information about gendered tax structures is extraordinarily hard to find. Taxation and Gender Equity is the product of an international and interdisciplinary effort to discover and document the impacts of tax structures on gender equity. Coordinated by Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia, the project brought together research teams from Argentina, Ghana, India, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Uganda, and the United Kingdom (UK). The group developed a common analytical framework and applied it to each country: document the structure of taxes, discuss implicit or explicit gender biases within the tax system, and use household-level expenditure data to estimate how much men and women at different income levels pay in indirect taxes such as value added taxes, retail sales taxes, or excise taxes such as taxes on fuel or alcohol. The focus is on indirect taxes because these are major sources of tax revenue in all of the countries studied and the most important form of tax revenue for the majority of countries – Mexico, South Africa, and the UK are the only ones that raise more revenue from income taxes than indirect taxes. The incidence of indirect taxes was estimated using household-level expenditure data. But what can household-level data tell us about the taxes paid by individual men and women? The authors cut through this Gordian knot by dividing households into maleand female-type households. They use three measures of maleand femaleness: the gender of the household head, the gender of the main breadwinner, and the gender composition of the households; that is, whether the majority of the adults in the household were men or women. The male-type households and the female-type households were then divided into quintiles based on expenditures per capita. The research teams calculated taxes as a percentage of household expenditures for the bottom 20 percent of female-type households and compared these to the taxes paid by the bottom 20 percent of male-type BOOK REVIEWS