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The Allocation of Expenditures within the Household: A New Survey *
Author(s) -
Bonke Jens,
Browning Martin
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
fiscal studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1475-5890
pISSN - 0143-5671
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-5890.2009.00104.x
Subject(s) - wife , clothing , distribution (mathematics) , survey data collection , economics , descriptive statistics , time use survey , danish , autonomy , time allocation , consumer expenditure survey , set (abstract data type) , demographic economics , public economics , geography , statistics , aggregate expenditure , computer science , political science , work (physics) , mechanical engineering , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , management , archaeology , engineering , law , programming language
We report on a data initiative that is designed to address the question of ‘who gets what’ within the household. The data consist of supplements to the Danish Household Expenditure Survey (DHES), which is a traditional nationally representative diary‐based survey of expenditures. We collect supplementary data of two kinds for all couples (with or without children) in the survey. The first set of additional information is that respondents report on the intra‐household allocation of each item of expenditure recorded in the diary. The allowed assignments are ‘the whole family’, ‘the wife’, ‘the husband’, ‘the children’, ‘others’ and ‘not assignable’. The second addition is an extra set of ‘sociological’ questions concerning household financial management, autonomy and family background. We focus on the survey design and give some descriptive statistics from the survey. We also show how the distribution of expenditure on clothing, which is often used to look at intra‐household allocation, is related to the distribution of expenditure on other goods. The paper concludes that it is feasible to collect information on ‘who gets what’ within the household and that some sociological questions provide valuable supplementary information for some issues of interest.