This paper considers the potential impact of welfare benefits on the partnership status of women in the UK. Using recent policy reforms to identify the response rate I find that a £100/week welfare benefit "partnership penalty" reduces the probability of a woman having a partner by seven...

We study the effect of institutional childcare on child penalties. Using Swiss administrative data, we exploit the staggered opening of childcare facilities across municipalities in the canton of Bern. We find that the presence of childcare facilities in the year of birth of the first child...

This paper studies the design of couples' income taxation. Consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made by maximizing a weighted sum of the spouses' utilities; bargaining weights are given but specific to each couple. The information structure and labor supply decisions...

We study the effect of institutional childcare on child penalties. Using Swiss administrative data, we exploit the staggered opening of childcare facilities across municipalities in the canton of Bern. We find that the presence of childcare facilities in the year of birth of the first child...

Empirically analyzing household behavior usually relies on informal data preprocessing. That is, before an econometric model is estimated, observations are selected in such a way that the resulting subset of data can be assumed to be sufficiently homogeneous with respect to the specific research...

In a careful and thorough empirical study, Christopher Udry (1996) shows convincingly that, in a large sample of West African households, household resource allocations were not Pareto efficient. This paper argues that observation of the Pareto inefficiency of a household resource allocation...

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households’ consumption expenditures and their perceived...

We use survey evidence on reported spending in hypothetical energy price shock scenarios to study novel features of the price elasticity of energy demand and the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) after paying the energy bill. We find that the price elasticity is significantly larger for price...

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households’ consumption expenditures and their perceived...