Impact of Married Women's Employment on Individual Household Member Expenditures for Clothing

Family member and per capita clothing expenditures are estimated via tobit, using 1980–1981 Consumer Expenditure Survey data. Occupation categories are developed and implicit wage rates imputed for each wife in the sample. Employed‐wife households have higher expenditures for clothing than do nonemployed‐wife households and wife's occupation differentially affects family member expenditures. Wife's implicit wage is not significant, while wife's unearned income has a positive impact on all categories of expenditures except for infants. These results indicate that it is not possible to generalize across family members about the influence of income and socio‐demographic variables on clothing expenditures.