How much did working wives contribute to changes in income inequality between couples in the UK?

<p>A number of studies have established that income inequality in the United Kingdom has gone up quite dramatically since the late 1970s (see Goodman and Webb (1994) and Jenkins (1995)). There is also agreement on the proximate causes of this rise: the growing dispersion of incomes from work (Gosling,Machin and Meghir, 1994); the increase in benefit-dependent families; and the growing polarisation between dual-earner and no-earner families (Gregg and Wadsworth, 1994; Harkness, Machin and Waldfogel, 1994; Machin and Waldfogel, 1994). This paper focuses on the last phenomenon. </p>