The Income Cliff in Households: Insights from Agent-Based Computational Modelling

In Western countries, the distribution of relative incomes within marriages tends to be skewed in a remarkable way. Husbands usually do not only earn more than their wives, but there is a striking discontinuity in their relative contributions to household income at the 50/50 demarcation line: many wives contribute less than or almost as much as their husbands, but few contribute more. This ‘cliff’ has been interpreted as evidence that men and women avoid situations where the wife would earn more than her husband, since this would run against traditional gender norms. In this paper, we use agent-based computational modelling to demonstrate that the cliff in the relative-income distribution can also emerge without such avoidance. We feed our computational simulations with income data from 27 European countries. Results show that a cliff can emerge from differences in men’s and women’s average incomes, even if they do not attach special meaning to a situation in which a wife earns more than her husband.Eurostat, the European Commission, and the national statistical offices collecting the data have no responsibility for the results and conclusions which were drawn in this paper on the basis of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the 2017 conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists in Oslo, Norway.status: publishe