The songs tell us that when two people are in love, their souls unite; their two hearts beat as one. The Code also tells us that their two tax liabilities can be as one, united in a joint tax return – but only if they are not simply in love, but are also married. While tax theorists have debated the appropriateness of the joint return, they have not examined the premise behind the joint return: that married people – and only married people – share not only their hopes and dreams, but also their money.

EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF ASSET POOLING AND CONTROL SHARING

The theoretical justification for the joint return – the belief that married couples share resources – is largely unsupported by empirical evidence. Recently, however, a number of studies have explored intrafamily allocations because of a growing recognition of this issue's importance to a wide array of social welfare programs. These studies indicate “that individual incomes are not simply pooled and then spent to meet household needs in some unified fashion. Rather, they are spent at least in part according to the earner's own preference.” This apportionment phenomenon is true even when the couple states that they pool or share resources.

I examined three studies of intrafamily resource allocation as well as my own. My study was an anonymous ninety-three question survey that was distributed twice. The three prior intrafamily studies I examined were the vast study in the 1983 book American Couples by Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, a small 1986 study of dual-career couples in the greater Chicago area by Rosanna Hertz, and an English study of 102 married couples conducted specifically on the issue of money and marriage by Jan Pahl.