How Do Spouses Share their Full Income in Russia?: Identification of the Sharing Rule Using Self-reported Income

The paper applies the collective model to the analysis of intra-household inequality using self-reported income scales and provides a test for its assumptions. We assume a correspondence between the income level that household members report and their true income sharing. Using Russian data, we first show that this assumption is supported by the data, and then use couples who report the same level of income to identify the full sharing rule for the whole sample. From simulations for an average couple living in the Urals, we find that a full income share of 45% is allocated to the wife.