Will Women Save More Than Men? A Theoretical Model of Savings and Marriage
Abstract
This paper presents an inter-temporal model of individual behavior with uncertainty about marriage and divorce and which accommodates the possible presence of economies or diseconomies of scale from marriage. We show that a scenario of higher marriage rates and higher divorce rates will be associated with higher savings rates in the presence of economies of marriage and with lower savings rates in the presence of diseconomies of marriage. In the context of traditional gender roles, this implies higher saving rates by young men and lower saving rates by young women than in less traditional countries, the opposite being the case with saving rates of married women relative to those of married men. We establish the relevance of traditional gender roles and marital status to understanding cross-country variation in gender differentials in savings behavior.Download Info
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, College of William and Mary in its series Working Papers with number 95.Length: 22 pages
Date of creation: 15 Sep 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cwm:wpaper:95
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Web page: http://www.wm.edu/economics/
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Related research
Keywords: savings behavior; marriage; divorce; economies of marriage; gender roles;Other versions of this item:
- Shoshana Amyra Grossbard & Alfredo Marvao Pereira, 2010. "Will Women Save more than Men? A Theoretical Model of Savings and Marriage," CESifo Working Paper Series 3146, CESifo Group Munich.
- E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
- J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2010-09-25 (All new papers)
- NEP-MAC-2010-09-25 (Macroeconomics)
References
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Discussion Paper
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