Research

Professor Valérie Lechene, University College London

Gender Inequality in Expenditure: Great Britain 1978 to 2019
Wednesday, 2 December 2026. 15:00
Room 383 ASBS

Abstract

Standard inequality measures assume equal sharing within households, making within-household gender inequality invisible. We recover each adult’s relative resource share, their share of adult expenditure, from standard budget survey data, without imposing equal sharing or identifying children’s consumption, using weaker identifying assumptions than prior approaches. For Great Britain, 1978–2019, we find women’s relative resource shares rose 12–13 percentage points, from well below parity to roughly parity with men, across all women, not just due to improving female characteristics. Consequently, rising within-household equality offset much of the rise in household-level inequality in the 1980s–90s.

Bio

Valérie Lechene is an applied microeconomist, interested in understanding the behaviour of individuals, both theoretically and empirically, with the aim of informing policy. Part of her research focuses on modelling intra-household behaviour in order to understand how individuals interact to reach the decisions whose consequences we see. She also has a long-standing interest in consumption and demand, which has informed both her research and policy oriented work, conducted for UK government bodies. She was educated in France, where she obtained a PhD from Delta-Ehess (now PSE).
Valérie is a professor in the Department of Economics at UCL and a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

 

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First published: 12 October 2026