Maxwell Rong presented his paper “Income Dynamics and Rent Sharing of Coworking Couples” at the All California Labor Economics Conference (ACLEC) this fall. In that paper he compares the earnings of couples who work at the same employer to see how much their earnings increase when firm profits increase. He is using Norwegian data and finds there is a big discrepancy in rent sharing. For the men in coworking couples, the performance of the firm and their pay are closely related, but for women it is not.
You could do a similar analysis for the US using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) dataset. Henry Hyatt has previously done work identifying co-working couples using the 2000 Census to identify couples. His paper focused on the patterns of co-working and co-habitation (people are more likely to live together before they work together, rather than the other way around). The 2010 Census or ACS could also provide a good survey-based sample of couples. For a larger sample, you could also use 1040 tax returns and define couples as joint tax filers.
I think there are interesting dynamics you could look at just within the LEHD data, but to get an estimate of rent sharing, you will need some business data, in particular the Longitudinal Business Database. It can be linked at the firm level to the Title 261 version of LEHD Employer Characteristics File (ECFT26).
So, the datasets you would need are the LEHD-Employer History File (EHF), the LEHD-Employer Characteristics File (ECF), a way to identify couples (Decennial 2000/2010, ACS or IRS 1040), probably the LEHD residential history files (CPR/RCF), and the LBD.
I don’t think I’ve seen any work other than Henry’s paper that looks at co-working couples, so there is definitely scope for more work to be done, whether on rent sharing like Rong has shown with Norwegian data, or on other dynamics.