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...

In this paper we exploit the specific structure of the Euler equation and develop two alternative GMM estimators that deal explicitly with measurement error. The first estimator assumes that the measurement error is lognormally distributed. The second estimator drops the distributional...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient...

We report on a new diary based expenditure survey that for the first time collects direct information on the allocation of all expenditures to different members of the household. The most important finding from the survey is that the mean share that wives have of all expenditures that are...

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...