Who Pays the Rent? Who Pays for the Kids? How Married vs. Cohabiting Parents Divide Expenses for the Household and the Child when the Couple Keeps Separate Purses

Catherine T. Kenney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study ("FFCW") to examine how cohabiting as opposed to married parents divide expenses for the household, such as rent and utilities, and expenses for their child. Currently, very little is known about economic relationships, including the sharing of income and dividing of expenses, in cohabiting-parent households. Thus, the implications of the increasing frequency of this family form for child poverty and inequality are unclear, in part because we do not know whether the economic contributions of cohabiting fathers to their partners and children are more similar to those of married fathers or to those of unmarried, non-resident fathers. In this paper, I consider the effects of marital status, household division of labor, family complexity, couple conflict, and race and ethnicity on the division of expenses in married-parent and cohabiting-parent households.