Patriarchal Rent Seeking in Entrepreneurial Households: An Examination of Business Ownership and Housework Burdens in Black and White US Couples

AbstractThis article studies the relationship between unpaid housework and business ownership in the United States. To examine this empirically, it uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data from 1985 to 2019 to document patterns in household production among business-owning households, with a special focus on Black and White opposite-sex couples in the United States. Descriptive evidence suggests that in married White couples, husbands face lower housework hours when owning a business compared to those who do not. However, this result does not hold for Black men. In fact, among Black couples, results suggest positive associations between wives’ business ownership and their housework hours. These results suggest the presence of patriarchal social norms allows White entrepreneurial men to extract rents: White men’s entrepreneurship may be propped up by their unique ability to recede from domestic responsibilities, a notion consistent with theories on patriarchal rent seeking.HIGHLIGHTSAmong US couples, less time spent on housework may provide advantages for entrepreneurs.White businesses-owning husbands are afforded reduced housework relative to peers.This phenomenon is unique among White men.Black businesses-owning wives do more housework than non-entrepreneuring peers.Industry selection does not explain away this trend among Black women.Race and gender hierarchies allow White men more resources in entrepreneurship.Small-business policymakers should work to alleviate inequities in unpaid work.KEYWORDS: Entrepreneurshipfeminist economicshousehold bargaininghouseworkpatriarchal rent seekingracial inequalityJEL Codes: L26B54D13 ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Elissa Braunstein for their guidance on earlier versions of this work, as well as the audience members at the 2021 International Association for Feminist Economics Conference and the Western States Graduate Student Workshop where this paper was presented.Notes1 The term intersectionality refers to the critical insight that race, class, gender, and other social categories “operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (Hill Collins Citation2015: 2). Experts in intersectional theory suggest that researchers “must analyze each structural inequality separately, as well as simultaneously” (Bowleg Citation2008: 319).2 Business ownership can lead to tensions around fair allocations of labor in the home. Sharon Danes and Erin Morgan (Citation2004) find that business-owning husbands and wives report conflicts related to work-family life balance and unfair distributions of resources (that is, money, time, energy) between family and business systems.3 Social reproduction theorists examine the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism and offers a distinct perspective that considers housework as reproductive labor: part of what creates and sustains workers (Fraser Citation2017).4 Additionally, within Black US couples, there is a long history of role sharing and fluidity in work that can be traced to the slavery era (Sayer and Fine Citation2011).5 PSID does not include information on whether one or more of the household members is transgender and only began explicitly identifying same-sex couples in 2015. I also use American Time Use Data in subsequent robustness checks.6 Businesses include both incorporated and unincorporated businesses. Unfortunately, PSID does not include information on whether or not a business is run out of the home, though these data would be very useful for this analysis.7 Hausmann tests indicate that fixed effects models are appropriate for both Models 1 and 2.8 Bootstrapped standard errors (rather than clustered) or standard errors clustered at the state level do not meaningfully change regression results.9 Married couples who are subsequently separated or divorced are removed from the sample. Analyses of the interactions between housework, entrepreneurship, and marital stability are worth pursuing in future research but are beyond the scope of this study, which aims to focus on behavior within the marriage contract.10 While PSID goes back to 1969, I drop data before 1985 in this study because this is when the survey began using a consistent measure for race. Since 1985, PSID respondents have been able to indicate more than one race.11 In these data, the sample sizes of mixed-race couples are very small: 82 percent of unmarried Black men in an opposite-sex couple are partnered with a Black woman, and 91 percent of unmarried White men in an opposite-sex couple are partnered with a White woman. Among opposite-sex married couples, 93 percent of Black men are married to a Black woman, and 97 percent of White men are married to a White woman.12 PSID asked whether a household received help (paid or unpaid) with housework from outside the family unit only during the years 1968 to 1972. This analysis, which span 1985 to 2019, therefore does not include direct analyses of housework outsourced to paid laborers.13 This model is constructed similarly to the event study model from Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers (Citation2006).14 Appendix 3 shows these figures when the independent variables of interest are time before and during wives’ business ownership (as opposed to husbands’, shown here). I do not present them here because they are not statistically significant results.15 While time-use data in ATUS have a large proportion of zeros for time spent on specific types of activity, previous research using time-diary data finds OLS models yield unbiased estimates, but estimates from tobit and two-part models are often bias (Stewart Citation2013). Felix Muchomba and Neeraj Kaushal (Citation2022) explain that this may be because the zeros in time-use data arise not from censoring but from a short reference period (for example, just one day in the case of ATUS).Additional informationNotes on contributorsSarah F. SmallSarah F. Small is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah. Her research interests include intrahousehold bargaining, care markets, the occupational crowding hypothesis, history of feminist economic thought, and feminist methodology. She earned her PhD from Colorado State University and held a postdoc at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.