IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_11311.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Cost of Gender Identity Norms: Evidence from a Spouse Tax Credit

Author

Listed:
  • Tommaso Giommoni
  • Enrico Rubolino

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of tax incentives on economic behavior within the household. We focus on an Italian tax policy that grants a large tax credit to main earners if their spouses, designated as “dependent spouses” by the tax law, report income below a certain threshold. Combining a novel administrative dataset with a bunching approach, we find that second-earner women adjust their income to benefit from the tax credit, while second-earner men do not. Second-earner women holding more conservative gender norms are the ones who mostly reduce their income. This suggests that tax policies can exacerbate economic inequalities among families and depress female labor market outcomes when they interact with entrenched gender norms.

Suggested Citation

  • Tommaso Giommoni & Enrico Rubolino, 2024. "The Cost of Gender Identity Norms: Evidence from a Spouse Tax Credit," CESifo Working Paper Series 11311, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11311
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11311.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    spouse tax credit; income taxation; gender norms; bunching; household behavior; female labor supply;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11311. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.