Income Inequality and Household Labor

• In Event: 212 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Labor and Inequality

Abstract

Income inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the mid 1970s. This remarkable change in the distribution of household income has spurred a great deal of research on the social and economic consequences of exposure to high inequality. However, the empirical record on the effects of income inequality is mixed. Cross-national research often documents negative effects of living in a high inequality regime, but studies that exploit within state and over time variation in inequality within the United States generally find much weaker effects. In this paper, we suggest that previous research has generally overlooked a simple but important pathway through which inequality might affect daily life: inequality allows the rich to hire the the poor to perform domestic labor. One important venue where such dynamics might manifest is in time spent on housework and in particular in the time divide in housework between rich and poor women. We combine micro-data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) with area-level data on income inequality to first assess if the gap in housework time between rich and poor women is larger in more unequal places and, second, to examine if rich women are more likely than poor women to pay for household services in contexts of higher inequality.

Authors

• Daniel J. Schneider, University of California-Berkeley

• Orestes 'Pat' Hastings, University of California-Berkeley