It is universally accepted that children have important effects on household demand patterns. This is usually attributed to the direct effect of children; for example children are food intensive. Alternative inferences are that the observed correlations between children and demand patterns are...

Several models of intra-household decision making have been suggested in the literature. One important dichotomy is between non-cooperative and cooperative models (including specific models of bargaining). The other important distinction is between models that allow for caring and those that do...

There are extensive literatures within economics and economic psychology on the allocation of household income within the household.  These two literatures are largely disjoint but both use a concept of 'income pooling'.  In economics this refers to the independence of household decisions from...

Most econometric schemes to allow for heterogeneity in micro behaviour have two drawbacks: they do not fit the data and they rule out interesting economic models.  In this paper we consider the time homogeneous first order Markov (HFOM) model that allows for maximal heterogeneity.  That is,...

Allocations familiales et autres transferts cibles sont generalement verses aux meres, sur la base de l`observation qu`augmenter la part des ressources controlees par les meres conduit a ameliorer le bien-etre des enfants. Nous recensons un ensemble de resultats empiriques qui etablisent le...

We derive distributional effects for a non-cooperative alternative to the unitary model of household behaviour. We consider the Nash equilibria of a voluntary contributions to public goods game. Our main result is that, in general, the two partners either choose to contribute to different public...

We consider dynamic discrete choice models with heterogeneity in both the levels parameter and the state dependence parameter. We first analyse the purchase of full fat milk using a long consumer panel (T 100) on many households. The large T nature of the panel allows us to consistently...

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple`s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus...

There is widespread agreement that given currently available data, we cannot accurately estimate the parameters of intertemporal allocation using GMM on Euler equations, whether they be exact or approximate. Our reading of this literature and our own results is that this is a small sample...

All empirical models of earnings processes in the literature assume a good deal of homogeneity. In contrast to this we model earnings processes allowing for lots of heterogeneity between agents. We also introduce an extension to the linear ARMA model that allows that the initial convergence to...