One major objection to neoclassical economic theory raised by feminist economists is that traditional theory neglects what goes on within families. This paper examines the policy relevance of this feminist critique by asking whether our understanding of the poverty experiences of individual...

Many economists have until fairly recently treated the family as a "black box" -- analysing the behaviour of "the family" rather than of the individuals within the family. In this paper, we outline the new "collective" approach to modelling family behaviour which makes explicit the fact that...

This paper explores the connection between the labour market and child overweight status in Canada. The labour market is a social institution which plays a critical role in determining how families live their day-to-day lives, for example, how much time and which parts of the day are available...

We study changes in time and money available to families with children from 1971 to 2006. Increases in incomes at the top of the Canadian income distribution since the mid-1990s have taken place without any significant increases in total family hours of paid work. On the other hand, for families...

This paper uses longitudinal microdata from the Statistics Canada National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) to study the family income dynamics of Canadian children from the time they are 4 or 5 until they are 14 or 15. Dynamics of family income have been studied less often than...