Krishna Pendakur: Within Household Inequality in the UK Over Five Decades (with Heidi Karjalainen and Valérie Lechene)

We estimate women’s resource shares, defined as the fraction of household expenditure consumed by women, in UK households over the period 1978 to 2016. We find that women’s resource shares increased substantially over 1978 to 1996 and were flat thereafter. We also show how increasing education and labour force attainment of women played into this process. These factors did not drive resource share growth over the first half of the period. Over the second half, although these factors improved, the returns to them declined, resulting in flat resource shares over the second half of the period.