Using data from over 500,000 dual-earner households in Mexico, we provide evidence of discontinuities in the distribution of relative income within households in Latin America. Similar to the situation in high-income countries, we observe a sharp drop at the 50% threshold, i.e., where the wife earns more than the husband, but the discontinuity is up to five times larger and has increased over time. These patterns are robust to the exclusion of equal earners, self-employed individuals, and couples in the same occupation/industry. Discontinuities persist across subgroups, including couples with or without children, those with married or unmarried partners, and those with older wives or female household heads. We also find comparable discontinuities in Brazil and Panama, as well as among some same-sex couples. Moreover, women who are primary earners continue to supply more nonmarket labor than do their male partners, although the gap is narrower than in households where the woman is the secondary earner.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.