We extend the nonparametric ‘revealed preference’ methodology for analyzing collective consumption behavior (with consumption externalities and public consumption), to render it useful for empirical applications that deal with welfare-related questions. First, we provide a nonparametric...

We non-parametrically test a general collective consumption model with public consumption and externalities inside the household. We further propose a novel approach to model special cases of the general collective model. These special cases include alternative restrictions on the 'sharing rule'...

This paper uses detailed diary information from the British Family Expenditure Survey (FES) to investigate the expenditure patterns of school-age children. We estimate a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System, and find that, whilst most commodities are normal goods, sweets and toys are luxury...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for policy...

This paper considers several alternative explanations for the fact that households with higher levels of lifetime income ( the rich') have higher lifetime saving rates (Dynan, Skinner, and Zeldes (1996); Lillard and Karoly (1997)). The paper argues that the saving behavior of the richest...

We conduct a proper test of the claim that people are overconfident, in the sense that they believe that they are better than others. The results of the experiment we present do not allow us to reject the hypotheses that the data has been generated by perfectly rational, unbiased, and...

Tipping is a phenomenon that has been studied for many years, but is receiving increased attention in recent years. The magnitude of tips is very large – in the US, for example, tips in the food industry alone amount to about $42 billion each year, and tips are given in many other...

This paper adopts a relative approach to the fulfillment of basic needs. It constructs a basic needs gap index (BNGI)to measure the performance of selected Muslim countries at three points of time 1987, 1991, and 1994