TY  - JOUR
AU  - Pollak,Robert A.
TI  - Bargaining Power in Marriage: Earnings, Wage Rates and Household Production
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11239
PY  - 2005
Y2  - April 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11239
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11239.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert Pollak
Washington University in St. Louis
Arts and Sciences
and the Olin Business School
Campus Box 1133
1 Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO  63130-4899
Tel: 314/935-4918
Fax: 314/935-6359
E-Mail: pollak@wustl.edu
AB  - What determines bargaining power in marriage? This paper argues that wage rates, not earnings, determine well-being at the threat point and, hence, determine bargaining power. Observed earnings at the bargaining equilibrium may differ from earnings at the threat point because hours allocated to market work at the bargaining solution may differ from hours allocated to market work at the threat point. In the divorce threat model, for example, a wife who does not work for pay while married might do so following a divorce; hence, her bargaining power would be related to her wage rate, not to her earnings while married. More generally, a spouse whose earnings are high because he or she chooses to allocate more hours to market work, and correspondingly less to household production and leisure, does not have more bargaining power. But a spouse whose earnings are high because of a high wage rate does have more bargaining power. Household production has received little attention in the family bargaining literature. The output of household production is analogous to earnings, and a spouse's productivity in household production is analogous to his or her wage rate. Thus, in a bargaining model with household production, a spouse's productivity in home production is a source of bargaining power.
ER  -