Intra-Couple Wealth Inequality: What’s Socio-Demographics Got to Do with it?

Abstract

Existing literature shows that on average and across countries, men have higher levels of wealth than women. However, very little is known about the gender-specific wealth gap within couples. This paper studies this phenomenon for the first time in Austria. The particular focus of the paper is on the relationship between the socio-demographic characteristics of the couple and the couple’s gender wealth gap. We focus on how age, education, marital status, fertility, migratory background, and the gender of the respondent are related to the wealth gap within a couple. In both bivariate and multivariate analyses, we find evidence in support of the hypothesis that bargaining power plays an important role in the intra-couple gender wealth gap in Austria. Immigrant women living in a couple with native men, and, among natives, couples in which the man is much older on average, have larger gender wealth gaps. Furthermore, couples in which the woman is the “financially most knowledgeable person” in the household have consistently lower gender wealth gaps.

Wealth Accumulation and the Gender Wealth Gap Across Couples’ Legal Statuses and Matrimonial Property Regimes in France

“…Age difference and having divorced in the past account for different dynamics across partners within the same couple. Citizenship controls for migration background, as migrants typically have lower net worth than natives (Rehm et al, 2022). Educational attainment allows controlling for different financial potential.…”

“…Wealth is an important dimension of economic well-being (Killewald, 2017;Hamoudi & Dowd, 2013;Wolff & Zacharias, 2009), and understanding its determinants has become increasingly scrutinized in the sociological, demographic, and economic literature. Although wealth inequality between households has been increasing throughout the developed world over recent decades (Piketty, 2013), a less documented phenomenon is the substantial wealth inequality within households that has been found in several countries, such as France (Frémeaux & Leturcq, 2020), Germany (Sierminska et al, 2018) or Austria (Rehm et al, 2022). It increased in France between 1998 and 2015 (Frémeaux & Leturcq, 2020), while it decreased in Germany between 2002 and 2012 (Sierminska et al, 2018).…”