Intra-household allocation of resources

Intra-household inequality and material deprivation

Key questions

How are resources shared within households, especially when those households contain more than a just a couple and their dependent children?
To what extent does the sharing depend on who brings the income into the household?
Are patterns of sharing within households associated with some people being at greater or lesser risk of deprivation?

Motivation

Does the measurement of "deprivation" reflect how resources are actually shared between members of more complex households? Does this sharing depend on the employment status and earnings of the people in the household, and on social transfer policies? If the sharing isn't equal, should we change how we distribute tax and social benefits? This project explores whether the current way we measure "deprivation" is appropriate for complex households. Conventional measures of poverty and material deprivation treat the household as a single unit and assume that resources are shared within households to the equal benefit of all. Yet previous research has shown this is not always the case. In particular, previous studies have suggested that individuals who bring a greater proportion of income into the household are more likely to benefit from it. These previous studies have mostly focused on couples rather than on more complex family and household types, including for example those containing grandparents as well as parents and children, or containing adult offspring. And only a minority of studies have been able to examine variations in deprivation specifically for children, or for individual adults, as opposed to household-level deprivation.

This research is examining the issue of intra-household inequality and how our assessment about children's and adults' deprivation depends on how resources are shared within the household.

Summary

A summary of this research is presented here in English | French | Spanish

Publications

Intra-household inequality and adult material deprivation in Europe

This paper provides evidence on the following three issues: i) on the degree of intra-household inequality in material deprivation in different EU countries and whether this higher in multi-family household; (ii) the degree to which intrahousehold inequality in material deprivation depends on who brings the income into the household; (iii) on the degree of bias in material deprivation estimates produced based on the standard assumption of equal sharing of resources.

Read full paper here

Living arrangements intra-household inequality and children's deprivation

This paper provides evidence of children's living arrangements in different EU countries (including the proportion of children who live in multi-family households with parents and adult siblings, and/or their grandparents); ii) on the extent to which living in a multi-family household protects children against deprivation iii) on the extent to which brings the income in the household has implications on children's material deprivation.

Read full paper here (forthcoming)