IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v92y2010i3p536-548.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

For Better, For Worse: Intrahousehold Risk-Sharing over the Business Cycle

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen H. Shore

    (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract

Marriage allows couples to diversify labor income risks and dynamically coordinate labor supply decisions in response to shocks. This paper argues that these risk-sharing benefits of marriage are countercyclical; husbands' and wives' income changes are more positively correlated when the economy is growing rapidly. As a result, while individuals face more idiosyncratic income risk in bad times than in good, households do not. I exploit variation in the cross-sectional covariance of husbands' and wives' incomes to infer the covariance of past income changes. Couples with marriages spanning periods of greater economic expansion have more positively correlated incomes in the cross-section. © 2010 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen H. Shore, 2010. "For Better, For Worse: Intrahousehold Risk-Sharing over the Business Cycle," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(3), pages 536-548, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:92:y:2010:i:3:p:536-548
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00009
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    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:tpr:restat:v:92:y:2010:i:3:p:536-548. 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: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    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.