This paper examines the interactions between household members’ utilities when deciding whether or not to join the labor market. Using asymptotic least squares, we analyze a sample of 5425 couples living in France in 1997. By comparing the results obtained with more standard methods, we find...

If partners derive utility from joint leisure time, it is expected that they will coordinate their work schedules in order to increase the amount of joint leisure time. This paper tries to answer three questions using a new matching procedure where couples are matched to other couples. (1) Do...

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of...

El estudio de las preferencias es uno de los temas menos tratados por la econometría aplicada. En el presente artículo se pretende realizar una aproximación translogarítimica de las preferencias por medio de la construcción de un Índice de Satisfacción de los Hogares (ISH) con base al...

This paper argues that spacing between consecutive births is an important aspect of competition among siblings for survival. Since parents simultaneously choose their desired values of birth spacing and the amount of time and other resources invested in children (which in turn affect child...

This paper analyzes the household decision-making process leading to the allocation of time and consumption in the family. We estimate, on the British Household Panel Survey, a collective model of demand for leisure generalized to the production of a household public good. For the first time in...

Econometric simulations provide no evidence that families in West Virginia encouraged sons to drop out of high school in order to earn income as coal miners, at the net expense of later income that they would have earned with more education. Estimates of the typical family's subjective rate of...

Painkilling drugs produce a good called relief which reduces the fixed level of bad (pain) the individual is endowed with. These drugs have the side-effect of reducing the utility the individual gets from consuming goods. This means that the shadow price of relief counts not only the cost of...

This paper examines the determinants of child health in rural Ethiopia for the period 1994-97 using height-for-age z-scores as measures of long-term health. The panel nature of the data helps to control for community, household and individual level heterogeneity. Unlike most previous studies,...

We analyze how the financial crisis affected a wide range of investments in Indonesian children and children's outcomes including school enrollment, immunizations, and mortality. Our dataset is the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), a large nationally representative sample. We build on...