Abstract
Prior research links wealth transfers to reduced labour force participation, but their effects on intra-household allocation of domestic tasks remain unexplored. This paper explores how inheritances impact gender differences in time use within the household among heterosexual couples older than 50 years in Europe. We use panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyse the time spent on paid work, unpaid work, and leisure. We employ a Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model with fixed effects to estimate the impact of inheritances greater than €5,000 on time allocation to different activities within the household. Specifically, we adopt the intra-household approach to assess ownership, where we consider inheritances as individual assets, rather than the mainstream approach of inheritance pooling that considers inheritances as household assets. Our results show that women significantly reduce their time spent on unpaid work, specially when they are the inheritance owners and when they are aged between 50 and 70 years. Robustness analyses support these results, we find that the mechanism behind the decline in unpaid work is outsourcing to the market, and the results are mainly driven by liquidity constrained households. Our findings suggest that intergenerational wealth transfers in ageing societies shift intra-household dynamics, enhancing women’s bargaining power and reducing inequality in unpaid work among the poorest households.