Resource allocation in households with women as chief wage earners

Resource theory and the human capital argument remain the dominant theoretical perspectives for understanding household choice. Yet households in which wives earn more than their husbands do not reflect either one, possibly due to the assumption in these perspectives that all resources are pooled. Two studies investigated household resource allocation. The first found that when the woman was the chief wage earner, joint pools of money were used to cover routine expenses but separate pools were also used for several reasons. The second study investigated the apparent differences in wife-as-chief-earner households and husband-as-chief-earner households and found support for the results of the first.