Família e distribuição de renda: o impacto da participação das esposas no mercado de trabalho

Abstract

Transformations in the structure of the family have serious consequences on the income distribution. Since, in addition to its redistributive role, the family has the function of coordinating the process of generating income. Given the difficulties to consider families -with distinct sizes and structures, in this paper we opt to restrict our universe of analysis to nuclear families. That is, husband-wife with our without children. Within this universe, we investigate the impact of the wives' labor-farce participation on the family income distribution for the nine largest Brazilian metropolitan areas. More specifically, we compare the inequality in the distribution of families according to husband's earnings with the inequality associated with the distribution of families according to the sum of the spouses' earnings. In other words, we estimate the marginal impact of including wive's earnings on the inequality among nuclear families.