An Empirical Model of Discrete and Continuous Choice in Family Labor Supply.

Because of the interdependent nature of family labor supply decisions, the nonnegativity constrai nt on women's hours of work will spill over into other consumption an d labor supply decisions of the family. Here the author develops an e conometric model of family labor supply that captures this "spillove r," while addressing the usual censoring issues as well. The model i s based on a flexible direct utility function and permits unobservabl e differences in tastes. The model is estimated by the maximum likeli hood method on a sample of about 1,200 families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Copyright 1987 by MIT Press.