Income transfers from social programs are often not gender neutral, according to the vast literature on intrahousehold decision-making and allocation, and should affect the distribution of bargaining power within the household. This result, however, was by and large established under the assumption of marriage stability. If this assumption does not hold (because of divorce or separation), then the positive response of bargaining power to income found in the empirical research may be the artifact of sample selection. In this paper, we prove that the marriage stability assumption is wrong, even when applied to seniors. We use a noncontributory pension reform in Argentina, which resulted in an unexpected and substantial increase in permanent income for at least 1.8 million women, to study its effects on outcomes related to both marital stability and women’s bargaining power within the household. We find that the reform increased the probability of divorce or separation among highly educated senior women but had no impact on those with less education. Instead, the latter gained considerable bargaining power within the household by decreasing the probability of being the only one in charge of household chores along with an increase in their husbands’ participation in these chores.

中文翻译：

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永久性收入冲击对家庭妇女状况的影响：阿根廷养老金改革案例

根据关于家庭内部决策和分配的大量文献，社会项目的收入转移通常不是性别中立的，应该会影响家庭内部议价能力的分配。然而，这一结果大体上是在婚姻稳定的假设下成立的。如果这个假设不成立（因为离婚或分居），那么实证研究中发现的议价能力对收入的正响应可能是样本选择的产物。在本文中，我们证明婚姻稳定性假设是错误的，即使应用于老年人也是如此。我们在阿根廷使用非缴费型养老金改革，这导致至少 180 万妇女的永久收入意外大幅增加，研究其对与婚姻稳定性和家庭内妇女议价能力相关的结果的影响。我们发现改革增加了受过高等教育的老年女性离婚或分居的可能性，但对受教育程度较低的女性没有影响。相反，后者通过降低成为唯一负责家务的可能性以及增加丈夫参与这些家务的可能性，在家庭内获得了相当大的议价能力。