Gender Differences in Money Transfers within the Family. Evidence from Italy

This paper examines the changes of women’s contribution within the family in Italy over time. It uses two sources of data, namely ECHP and IT-Silc. The final goal is to detect whether women become more supportive in the household or not because of a number of factors occurred in the sample period. The contribution of each members within the family is defined as the difference between the personal and the per-capita income. We firstly perform separate estimates by gender and by sub-groups, namely receivers (if their contribution is negative) and givers (if their contribution is positive). Finally, we run a threefold Oaxaca decomposition. The results confirm that the differences between men and women are persistent and mainly due to unexplained factors.