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Whose Money? Whose Time? A Nonparametric Approach To Modeling Time Spent On Housework, Sanjiv Gupta, Michael Ash

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We argue that earlier quantitative research on the relationship between heterosexual partners’ earnings and time spent on housework has two basic flaws. First, it has focused on the effects of women’s shares of couples’ total earnings on their housework, and has not considered the simpler possibility of an association between women’s absolute earnings and housework. Consequently it has relied on unsupported theoretical restrictions in the modeling. We adopt a flexible, nonparametric approach that does not impose the polynomial specifications on the data that characterize the two dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, the “economic exchange” and “gender …