The debate in Australia on the (constant-output) elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages has wrongly sidelined the role of capital stock as a determinant of employment (Webster, 2003). As far back as 1991, Pissarides had argued that the influence of capital stock on the performance of...

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...

This paper proposes an extension of the collective model for labor supply developed by Chiappori, Fortin and Lacroix (2002) to an intertemporal setting. We first develop a theoretical model to analyze the intra-household distribution of wealth in a multi-period framework, with a focus on labor...

We investigate how, in temporary economic hardship, agents change their consumption of health services, and how this depends on whether the service is universally free-of-charge visits to GP's or privately co-financed dental care. We find that own expenditures for dental care decrease. The...

If the marginal utility of consumption depends on health status, this will affect the economic analysis of a number of central problems in public finance, including the optimal structure of health insurance and optimal life cycle savings. In this paper, we describe the promises and challenges of...

We examine the effects of monetary policy on household self-assessed financial stress and durable consumption using panel data from eighteen annual waves of the British Household Panel Survey. For identification, we exploit random variation in household exposure to interest rates generated by...

In the tradition of Afriat (1967), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982), we provide a revealed preference characterisation of the representative consumer. Our results are simple and complement those of Gorman (1953, 1961), Samuelson (1956) and others. They can also be applied to data very readily...

We examine Becker's (1960) contention that children are "normal." For the cross section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the U.S., we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly-educated women living in similarly-expensive locations, completed fertility is positively correlated...

Non-positivity of the generalized substitution effect, non-positivity of the own-price substitution effect, homogeneity of degree zero in all prices and income, and the law of demand are some of the most primitive comparative static results in the standard revealed preference theory of...