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Post-Marital Residence: Taxation
Post-Marital Residence: Taxation
In some countries a married person or couple benefits from various taxation advantages not
available to a single person. For example, spouses may be allowed to average their
combined incomes. This is advantageous to a married couple with disparate incomes. To
compensate for this, countries may provide a higher tax bracket for the averaged income of a
married couple. While income averaging might still benefit a married couple with a stay-at-home
spouse, such averaging would cause a married couple with roughly equal personal incomes to pay
more total tax than they would as two single persons. In the United States, this is called the marriage
penalty.[citation needed]
When the rates applied by the tax code are not based income averaging, but rather on the sum of
individuals' incomes, higher rates will usually apply to each individual in a two-earner households in
a progressive tax systems. This is most often the case with high-income taxpayers and is another
situation called a marriage penalty.[93]
Conversely, when progressive tax is levied on the individual with no consideration for the
partnership, dual-income couples fare much better than single-income couples with similar
household incomes. The effect can be increased when the welfare system treats the same income
as a shared income thereby denying welfare access to the non-earning spouse. Such systems apply
in Australia and Canada, for example. [citation needed]
Post-marital residence
In many Western cultures, marriage usually leads to the formation of a new household comprising
the married couple, with the married couple living together in the same home, often sharing the
same bed, but in some other cultures this is not the tradition. [94] Among the Minangkabau of West
Sumatra, residency after marriage is matrilocal, with the husband moving into the household of his
wife's mother.[95] Residency after marriage can also be patrilocal or avunculocal. In these cases,
married couples may not form an independent household, but remain part of an extended family
household.
Early theories explaining the determinants of postmarital residence [96] connected it with the sexual
division of labor. However, to date, cross-cultural tests of this hypothesis using worldwide samples
have failed to find any significant relationship between these two variables. However, Korotayev's
tests show that the female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal
residence in general. However, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor.
Although, in different-sex marriages, an increase in the female contribution to subsistence tends to
lead to matrilocal residence, it also tends simultaneously to lead to general non-
sororal polygyny which effectively destroys matrilocality. If this polygyny factor is controlled (e.g.,
through a multiple regression model), division of labor turns out to be a significant predictor of
postmarital residence. Thus, Murdock's hypotheses regarding the relationships between the sexual
division of labor and postmarital residence were basically correct, though [97] the actual relationships
between those two groups of variables are more complicated than he expected. [98][99]
There has been a trend toward the neolocal residence in western societies.