How large are the economies of scale of living together? And how do partners share their resources? The first question is usually answered by equivalence scales. Traditional estimation and application of equivalence scales assumes equal sharing of income within the household. This paper uses...

This paper investigates the relationship between the probability of divorce and marriage specific investments. As these investments in terms of childcare and household activities are likely to increase the marital surplus, they are consequently likely to decrease the risk of divorce. All such...

Children are seldom accounted for in household behavioural models. They are usually assumed to have neither the capacity nor the power to influence the household decision process. The literature on collective models has so far incorporated children through the "caring preferences" of their...

This paper considers the association between intra-household resource allocation and couple financial hardships in Australia. It develops and estimates a collective household model of expenditures on individual-specific necessities and hardship reporting where each partner has a distinct utility...

Welfare analyses conducted by policy practitioners around the world usually rely on equivalized or per-capita expenditures and ignore the extent of within-household inequality. Recent advances in the estimation of collective models suggest ways to retrieve the complete sharing process within...

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...

This paper is concerned with patterns of expenditure and child welfare among female headed (FHH) and male headed households (MHH) in Tanzania as well as with the underlying cause of potentially different patterns. I estimate semiparametric Engel curves to investigate household expenditure...

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decision-making is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run...

While the job search literature has increasingly recognised the importance of the spatial distribution of employment opportunities, local labour market conditions have been a notable omission from much of the empirical literature on commuting outcomes. This study of the commute times of dual...

We study interdependencies in spousal labor supply and the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance in a sample of married couples, where the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure using data from the Austrian Social Security Database. We show that in our sample of...