Individual, Household and Gender Preferences for Social Transfers

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a nationally representative survey that assessed individual and household willingness to pay extra taxes for increased levels of social transfers in Ireland. Different respondents interpret willingness-to-pay questions as referring to individual or household budgets. This paper demonstrates that the most important variable explaining this is financial integration within the household and we argue that this is a potentially crucial source of differential item functioning in willingness-to-pay studies. Furthermore, individuals take intra-household bargaining considerations in to account when forming preferences for policies. Specifically, we find that gender differences emerge significantly for a specific fiscal policy when the policy alters the intra-household entitlement to income between the partners.Survey Methods, Household Economics