Blog: Economics in Action

Priceless? Free? Surely it differs on what you buy your true love? And why would you try to put a price on it?

The 12 days of Christmas, a popular Christmas song, begins with the line ‘On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me’. An American investment group PNC Wealth Management compile a Christmas Price Index (CPI) every year. Taking the meaning of the song quite literally they calculate the cost of true love.

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In the latest of a series of interviews from the Royal Economic Society Conference 2007, Romesh Vaitilingam talks to Kerry Papps the effect of divorce on women and work.

Listen to the interview

Married women work more hours in the labour market when they face a high likelihood of divorce: for example, a woman who is unhappy with her marriage will work on average 283 hours more in the following year than a woman who is very happy with her marriage. In contrast, married men are unaffected by the probability of divorce.

These are among the findings of new research by Kerry Papps. The study also finds that both single men and single women work more when they have a high chance of marrying in the near future.

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Human beings ability to cooperate with each other lies behind our success as a species. But since the skills of coalition-building are essentially for masculine activities notably hunting and warfare they have also been the key to mens subjugation of women.

That was the central message of Professor Paul Seabright when he delivered the 2005 Royal Economic Society Public Lecture on Thursday 8 December in Edinburgh and again on Friday 9 December in London.

Professor Seabrights lecture took his audience through a tour of the many ingenious strategies that males and females have used to manipulate their partners and rivals, from primates to prehistoric humans to modern men and women. He concludes:

Cooperative man was the key to our civilisation but he has used his success to isolate, confine and control the women in his life.

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Single women in Britain spend an average of 10 hours a week on housework whereas single men only spend 7 hours a week. But as soon as men and women form a union, women tend to spend more time on housework an average of 15 hours a week whereas men react in the opposite direction, falling to 5 hours a week.

Differences like this in spouses spending of time and money mean that on average, women obtain only 40% of a couples wellbeing.

These are among the findings of new research by Helene Couprie, published in the latest Economic Journal. Her research, which draws on data from the British Household Panel Survey, also finds that such gender inequalities within the household have a significant influence on gender inequalities in the workplace and vice versa.

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