How large are the economies of scale of living together? And how do partners share their resources? The first question is usually answered by equivalence scales. Traditional estimation and application of equivalence scales assumes equal sharing of income within the household. This paper uses...

This paper considers the association between intra-household resource allocation and couple financial hardships in Australia. It develops and estimates a collective household model of expenditures on individual-specific necessities and hardship reporting where each partner has a distinct utility...

Children are seldom accounted for in household behavioural models. They are usually assumed to have neither the capacity nor the power to influence the household decision process. The literature on collective models has so far incorporated children through the "caring preferences" of their...

We adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents, and assume that the household consumption is either private or public. We then show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from...

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children...

Do individuals divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure the attractiveness of new matches in the marriage market? We answer these questions using a structural model of the household and a rich panel dataset from Malawi. We propose a model of the household with consumption, production and...

Using household-level data, we explore the relationship between donations to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and other charitable donations. The empirical evidence suggests that donations specifically for the victims of the tsunami are positively associated with the amount...

We develop a collective household model with spousal matching in which there exists marital gains to assortative matching and marriage quality for each couple is revealed ex post. Changes in alimony laws are shown to affect existing couples and couples-to-be differently. For existing couples,...

This paper analyzes households' demand for time inputs to domestic services, modeling simultaneously the decision to purchase services in the market and the time spent on weekend and weekday days by each partner on routine household chores. By focusing on cleaning, laundry, and ironing, we...

Much of the recent literature in household economics has been critical of unitary models of household decision-making. Most alternative models currently used are bargaining models and consensual models, including collective models. This paper discusses another alternative: independent individual...