Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POPULATION-REVUE EUROPEENNE DE DEMOGRAPHIE
Volume 38, Issue 4, Pages 643-679Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10680-022-09632-5
Keywords
Wealth inequality; Gender wealth gap; Marriage; Property regime; Civil union; Unmarried cohabitation
Categories
Funding
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France (ANR) [ANR-21-CE41-0017-01]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study examines wealth accumulation among couple-headed households and finds that legal statuses and property regimes have a significant impact on wealth inequality between couples, with individual property regime in marriage driving wealth accumulation.
This paper examines wealth accumulation among couple-headed households and investigates changes in within-household inequality over time and across couple statuses. Going beyond previous research that mostly studies wealth accumulation within marriages by comparing married with unmarried individuals, we consider the legal statuses of couples (cohabitation, civil union, and marriage) and property regimes (community and separate property). We apply multivariate regression analysis to high-quality longitudinal data from the French wealth survey (2015-2018) and find no differences in net worth accumulation between couples' legal statuses when property regimes are not accounted for. However, couples with a separate property regime accumulate more wealth than couples with a community property regime, and married couples with a separate property regime drive this association. Our results show that the gender wealth gap is larger for couples with a separate property regime, but it is partially compensated by accumulated wealth. Our results highlight the importance of legal statuses and property regimes in explaining the dynamics of between- and within-household inequality in France, specifically within a context of increasingly diversified marital trajectories.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available