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Are Two Incomes Needed to Prosper Today? Evidence from the 1960s to the 1990s
Author(s) -
WALDEN MICHAEL L.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of consumer affairs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.582
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1745-6606
pISSN - 0022-0078
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-6606.2001.tb00106.x
Subject(s) - prosperity , economics , consumption (sociology) , labour economics , wage , work (physics) , dual (grammatical number) , demographic economics , economic growth , mechanical engineering , art , social science , literature , sociology , engineering
Consumer Expenditure Survey data from 1960 to 1996 are used to examine trends in real consumption, real after‐tax income, market work time, and real after‐tax wages for single‐earner and dual‐earner households. Over the entire time period, most households experienced substantial improvements in measures of their prosperity. However, economic progress was considerably reduced when the comparison was from 1972 to 1996. Also, wage changes dominated changes in market work time over all time periods.