This paper considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I use household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within...

The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more...

We propose a model of how parents resolve conflicts about sharing the negative short and long-term consequences from parenthood-related career interruptions on earnings. We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior with public consumption as in Blundell, Chiappori,...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely...

Increasing women's empowerment is a key objective of many development programs, both as a principal goal and as a path to economic development. We propose and test a novel economic intervention that relies on intra-household transfers of productive assets to increase women's empowerment among...

Childcare and women's employment decisions are intimately linked. I develop a dynamic model designed to analyse the effects of childcare subsidies on labour supply, fertility, marriage, and childcare decisions in a collective setting. In the model, children are a household good, produced by both...

This paper presents a model of consumption and household production that takes into account substitution between health-related goods that are produced at home and those produced commercially as well as substitution between goods produced at home by oneself and those produced by one's spouse or...

The existing literature suggests that when the saving decision of two-earner households under risk is analysed, standard results on the existence of precautionary saving no longer apply: precautionary saving is obtained if and only if very stringent conditions hold. This paper shows that when...

This paper aims to shed new light on explanations for the sexual division of labour, within a broader examination of within-household specialisation. We propose a set of indices which we believe are the first direct within-couple measures of specialisation. We use these to present a rich...