Individual Welfare Analysis for Collective Households

We propose novel tools for the analysis of individual welfare on the basis of aggregate household demand behavior. The method assumes a collective model of household consumption with the public and private nature of goods specified by the empirical analyst. A main distinguishing feature of our method is that it builds on a revealed preference characterization of the collective model that is intrinsically non-parametric. We show how to identify individual money metric welfare indices from observed household demand, along with the intra-household sharing rule and the individuals' willingness-to-pay for public consumption (i.e. Lindahl prices). The method is easy to use in practice and yields informative empirical results, which we demonstrate through a simulation analysis and an empirical application to labor supply data