In this paper, we adopt the usual assumptions of the collective approach, i.e. individualism and efficiency, to study household labor supply. The theoretical innovation is twofold. First, we incorporate the decision to participate in the labor market in the initial setting. Second, we abandon...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting specific individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage less...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

In this paper, we deal with female labour supply in the collective framework (Chiappori, Journal of Political Economy (1992)). We study married couples and start from the empirical observation that the husband's labour supply is generally determined by exogenous constraints. We then show that,...