Article

Efficiency-Equality Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study

Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, François Cochard, Hélène Couprie, and Astrid Hopfensitz

Abstract

We present the results of an experiment measuring social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a cross-country comparison between France and Germany. In particular, we show that German households are more inequality averse and are thus less efficient than French households. A decomposition of this difference reveals that approximately 40% is driven by diverging sample compositions in the two countries, while 60% of the initial French/German difference remains unexplained. Beliefs differ significantly from observed behavior in both countries. Efficient choices are overestimated in the German sample and underestimated in the French.

Replaces

Published in

Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, Paris, n. 117-118, June 2015, pp. 233–252