Udry (1996) uses household survey data and finds that the allocation of resources within households is Pareto inefficient, contradicting the main assumption of most collective models of intrahousehold bargaining. He finds that among plots planted with the same crop in the same year, within a...

We adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents, and assume that the household consumption is either private or public. We then show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from...

We study the macroeconomic effects of rational asset bubbles in an overlapping-generations economy where asset trading requires specialized intermediaries and where agents freely choose between working in the production or in the financial sector. Frictions in the market for deposits create...

We study human capital accumulation in an environment of competitive search. Given that unemployed workers can default on their education loans, skilled individuals with a larger debt burden prefer riskier but better paid careers than is socially desirable. A higher level of employment risk in...

We develop a collective household model with spousal matching in which there exists marital gains to assortative matching and marriage quality for each couple is revealed ex post. Changes in alimony laws are shown to affect existing couples and couples-to-be differently. For existing couples,...

Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale,...

As credit and insurance markets are imperfect, and given that intra-family transfers, and the way a child uses her time outside school hours, are private information, the second-best policy makes school enrollment compulsory, forces overt child labour below its efficient level (if positive), and...

Search Models of the labor market are widespread and influential but they usually ignore that labor market decisions are frequently taken at the household level. We fill this gap by developing and estimating an household search model with on-the-job search and labor supply. We build on previous...

This paper presents for the first time the properties of optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. A key contribution is the analysis of the interaction of second earner wage differences, variation in prices of bought-in...