In this paper, we propose a simple and direct test of income pooling within couples, and provide a typology of who pools resources and who does not. For this purpose, we performed a five-round experiment with 95 established real-life couples in Germany. In each round, the couples received the same total amount of money, but the relative allocation to the spouses differed while they had to agree on an irreversible private goods consumption pattern. Our first finding is that the consumption choices depend on the spouses’ relative resources for the majority of the sample. Though this suggests a rejection of income pooling at the mean, an unneglectable share of the couples do indeed pool their resources. Our second finding is that the pooling behaviour is negatively related with the heterogeneity of the spouses’ socio-economic characteristics. In particular, traditional couples with distinct work division between the spouses are significantly less likely to treat their individual resources symmetrically. Our third finding is that conventional variables used to approximate income pooling are only loosely related to the behaviour observed in our experiment.
In this paper, we propose a simple and direct test of income pooling within couples, and provide a typology of who pools resources and who does not. For this purpose, we performed a five-round experiment with 95 established real-life couples in Germany. In each round, the couples received the same total amount of money, but the relative allocation to the spouses differed while they had to agree on an irreversible private goods consumption pattern. Our first finding is that the consumption choices depend on the spouses’ relative resources for the majority of the sample. Though this suggests a rejection of income pooling at the mean, an unneglectable share of the couples do indeed pool their resources. Our second finding is that the pooling behaviour is negatively related with the heterogeneity of the spouses’ socio-economic characteristics. In particular, traditional couples with distinct work division between the spouses are significantly less likely to treat their individual resources symmetrically. Our third finding is that conventional variables used to approximate income pooling are only loosely related to the behaviour observed in our experiment.