Intra-household Gender Inequality, Welfare, and Economic Development

Differences in economic outcomes between men and women within a household, or intra-household gender inequality has suffered from relative neglect despite a renewed focus on gender inequality. Using global micro-data from nearly three million house-holds, we present evidence that this neglect renders our understanding of the relation-ship between gender inequality and economic development analytically and empirically incomplete. We show that intra-household gender inequality in earnings is persistent across the income distribution, across a wide range to countries, and over four-decades. For a sub-sample of countries, we show that the relationship between intra-household gender inequality and household economic status is non-monotonic – that we refer to as the “micro-Kuznets” relationship. We also develop an empirical framework to mea-sure the aggregate welfare loss from intra-household gender inequality. For a range of plausible inequality aversion assumptions, we report an median welfare loss of over 15% of aggregate earnings.