One major objection to neoclassical economic theory raised by feminist economists is that traditional theory neglects what goes on within families. This paper examines the policy relevance of this feminist critique by asking whether our understanding of the poverty experiences of individual...

Many economists have until fairly recently treated the family as a "black box" -- analysing the behaviour of "the family" rather than of the individuals within the family. In this paper, we outline the new "collective" approach to modelling family behaviour which makes explicit the fact that...

This paper explores the connection between the labour market and child overweight status in Canada. The labour market is a social institution which plays a critical role in determining how families live their day-to-day lives, for example, how much time and which parts of the day are available...

Why do Canadian mothers have lower incomes than women who have never had children? Microdata from the 1995 GSS allow examination of two hypotheses: (1) mothers have spent more time out of the labour force, thus acquiring less human capital; (2) higher levels of unpaid work lead to fatigue and/or...

We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to ask whether (a) parenting a child with a disability or chronic condition leads to lower maternal health status; (b) the association is larger over the longer term; and (c) health consequences are larger for lone than married...

This paper uses panel data from the Statistics Canada National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (1994-2000) to study the implications of parenting a child with a disability or chronic condition for subjective assessments of parental health. We find mother's health to be negatively...