Asymmetric effects of macro policies on women’s and men’s incomes. An empirical investigation of the eurozone crisis in a gender perspective

We study how macro policies affected women’s and men’s incomes during the financial crisis in Europe. We consider the monetary stance, proxied by benchmark interest rates, and the fiscal stance, measured by the variation in public expenditures and public revenues, and investigate how they are associated to women’s and men’s labor and capital incomes, using microdata for 27 European countries between 2008 and 2016. We individualize household-level data by considering four scenarios of intrahousehold sharing of resources. We also explore how and to what extent macro-policies affect the distribution of labour incomes for men and women by applying a conditional quantile regression approach. Results highlight that the ECB’s expansionary policies had a positive effect on both labor and capital incomes for both men and women, while austerity policies had a mixed impact. Reductions in public expenditure had the effect of reducing labor incomes for both men and women, particularly at the median of the wage and labor distributions. In contrast, increases in public revenues benefited capital incomes, for all income quantiles.