Women’s Participation in Intrahousehold Decision-making: Evidence from Italy

This paper studies the allocation of decision-making authority within households across domains. Using the Italian Survey of Consumer Expectations (ISCE), we construct a domain-specific measure of authority as the difference between women’s and men’s reported influence over each decision. We document strong domain specialization: authority is more male-leaning in financial and durable-goods decisions, while routine and childrelated choices are more female-leaning. Women’s authority rises with their income share, but the income–authority gradient steepest in high-stakes financial and durable-goods domains and flatter for routine and child-related choices. Relative education is less uniformly related to authority, with stronger gradients concentrated in finance and electronics. These patterns are robust to a couple-by-domain design with couple and domain fixed effects. Finally, the income–authority gradient is weaker among couples who use joint or mixed account arrangements, suggesting that household financial organization conditions how resources translate into authority.