Mine is Yours: Expense Sharing in Married and Cohabiting Households

Catharine H. Warner, University of Maryland

Relatively little is known about sharing economic resources within cohabiting relationships in the United States. Access to financial resources may affect individual outcomes and poverty definitions. Using the 2001 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this study compares the extent of household expense sharing among married and cohabiting couples and considers the role of relative resources and gender specialization. Multinomial logistic analyses suggest that relative resources do much to explain who pays the majority of household expenses, but also find support for differences in gender specialization in married and cohabiting households. The presence of children is positively related to specialization, but couples in which the male partner pays the majority of expenses are less likely to have a child not biologically related to a partner present. Couples in which the female partner pays the majority of expenses are more likely to be cohabiting than married.