【Empirical Seminar】The Within-Couple Wealth Gap: Do Intergenerational Transfers Play Any Role?
2024/08/12
研討會日期 : 2024-08-12
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Yoko Niimi
地點 : Conference room B110
主持人 : Professor Donghoon Yoo
演講者簡介 : Professor Yoko Niimi received her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2007. She is currently a professor at Doshisha University. Her research interests include intergenerational transfers, wealth accumulation, Population aging, Caregiving, Subjective well-being, Inequality, and Poverty.
演講摘要 : While wealth inequality has received much attention in recent years, the distribution of wealth within coupleshas been generally overlooked due partly to the unavailability of data on personal wealth. Using unique datafrom the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, this paper examines the extent of the within-couple wealthgap and possible factors that may contribute to it. It finds that the wife holds, on average, about 30% of thecouple’s total net worth, which is smaller than the shares found in previous studies for Western societies.Results from a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis based on unconditional quantile regression show thatthe gap is primarily associated with differing returns to covariates, particularly wives’ lower return onincome, at the lower tail of the distribution. At the median and upper quantiles, gender differences inendowments, namely income, drive the gap. However, the results also show that women enjoy better returnson their inheritances at the median and upper quantiles, suggesting that intergenerational transfers mattermore for wives’ wealth accumulation than for husbands’ and help reduce the within-couple wealth gap.
