We present identification and estimation results for the "collective" model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and nonparticipation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied by...

The extent to which individuals commit to their partner for life has important implications. This paper develops a lifecycle collective model of the household, through which it characterizes behavior in three prominent alternative types of commitment: full, limited, and no commitment. We propose...

In most industrialized countries, more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents. This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact children's mobility characteristics. A key insight we obtain is that...

To understand the household decision-making process regarding food expenditures for children in poor households in Nairobi, we conduct an experiment with 424 married couples. In the experiment, the spouses (individually and jointly) allocated money between themselves and nutritious meals for one...

This paper adopts an intertemporal labor supply perspective to propose a test that allows us to distinguish between intra-household non-commitment, limited commitment, and full commitment. It investigates whether, after controling for current and future (expected) wages, past wage shocks have a...

This paper studies household labor supply, within the context of an intertemporal collective model, and three prominent intrahousehold commitment regimes: full commitment, no commitment, and limited commitment. We propose a test that distinguishes among all three alternatives based on how...

This paper examines the effects of the Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples in Britain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using panel data from the British...

This article considers non-unitary models of household behavior. These models suppose explicitly that households consist of a number of different members with preferences that are different from each other. They can be split up into two principal categories: cooperative (or collective) models,...

"We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage...

We present a model with pre-marital schooling investment, endogenous marital matching and spousal specialization in homework and market production. Investment in schooling raises ages and generates two kinds of returns in our framework: a labor-market return and a marriage-market return because...