Much of the recent literature in household economics has been critical of unitary models of household decision-making. Most alternative models currently used are bargaining models and consensual models, including collective models. This paper discusses another alternative: independent individual...

A central component of his theory of marriage Becker's Demand and Supply (D&S) models of marriage are also among the most unique models he pioneered. Here I provide an overview of Becker's analysis of the effects of sex ratios - the ratio of men to women in marriage markets - on individual...

This paper reviews models of marriage, with special emphasis on how the sex ratio (the ratio of marriageable men to women) can help explain measurable outcomes such as marriage formation, intra-marriage distribution of consumption goods, savings, labor supply, leisure, type of relationship,...

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 custom of bride price involves the payment of goods or cash from the groom's family to the bride's family at the time of marriage. We present a theory that views bride price as a payment in hedonic markets for marital fidelity. Data from a household survey in Uganda are used to test the...

It follows from a number of theoretical models of marriage that the scarcer women are relative to men, i.e. the higher the sex ratio, the less married women are likely to participate in the labor force. Such sex ratio effects may be stronger among less educated women. These predictions are...

This paper investigates the likelihood of an unpartnered birth as a function of laws regulating the division of joint property in case of divorce. Based on a rational choice model of marriage and assuming that on average women earn less than men, we predict that women are less likely to have an...

This article uses data from the 1998-1999 French INSEE time use survey to estimate the time costs of children. The focus is on couples with two spouses working Full-Time in the labor force in order to avoid issues of substitution between home production and labor supply. Time costs are computed...

We make the novel argument that time spent on household chores can possibly reflect racial discrimination based on color. Our model, based on Becker's theory of allocation of time and his theory of marriage, recognizes that both intra-household bargaining and hedonic marriage markets operating...

If income pooling indicates primary earners' willingness to trade part of their income with spouses who earn less and work more in household production, then among specialized couples income pooling will be positively associated with the price of commercial domestic services, substitutes for...