Intra-Household Power and the Division of Unpaid Work: A Nash Bargaining Model With an Application to Vietnam

This paper develops and tests a Nash bargaining model of household labor allocation. The model explains how spouses allocate their time to housework by maximizing joint utility while accounting for outside options such as income opportunities. In this framework, the spouse contributing more earnings gains stronger bargaining power and can negotiate a smaller share of housework. Using Vietnamese panel data from 2018 and 2020, we estimate a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) system to examine how relative income influences household labor division. The results show that women with higher relative income reduce their housework time. Moreover, relative income affects the reallocation between spouses: husbands increase their contribution to domestic tasks while wives reduce theirs. For specific activities, relative income decreases wives’ time on both pure household chores and caregiving. Our findings contribute to the literature by providing evidence from a developing Asian country and underscore the importance of women’s economic empowerment in promoting gender equality in unpaid work.