Recent work criticises both the logic and relevance of the theoretical basis of the approach to estimating the costs of raising children adopted in much of the economics literature. This tends to be restricted purely to models in which the household members consume market goods with given...

We study the impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic on the time allocated to paid and unpaid work within households. We use panel data from 27 EU countries and isolate the impact of school closures by comparing parents and non-parents. We find no evidence that school closures had...

This paper is a survey of the literature on theoretical models of the household, paying particular attention to some of the earlier contributions, and using them to place the current state of the theory in perspective. One of its aims is to suggest that the literature's neglect of Samuelson's...

This paper investigates the impact of fathers' flexible working hours on their willingness to contribute to domestic work. We first hypothesize that fathers will contribute more if they have the possibility to work flexible hours. Second, fathers are assumed to contribute less if their female...

This paper is a survey of the literature on theoretical models of the household, paying particular attention to some of the earlier contributions, and using them to place the current state of the theory in perspective. One of its aims is to suggest that the literature's neglect of Samuelson's...

The paper addresses the less-researched topic of intrahousehold dynamics of female in-laws in developing countries by focusing on the bargaining between mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw and its influence on the latter's time allocation. Using the first nationally representative Time Use Survey...

Optimal taxes for Europe and the U.S. are derived in a realistically calibrated model in which agents buy consumption goods and services and use home capital and labor to produce household services. The optimal tax rate on services is substantially lower than the tax rate on goods. Specifically,...

The existing literature suggests that the concern for economic efficiency calls for individual taxation of married couples with a higher rate on the primary earner. This paper reconsiders the choice of tax unit in the Becker model of household production, which includes previous analyses as...

This paper deals with optimum commodity taxation in Becker's (1965) model of the allocation of time. While the existing public finance literature emphasizes the role of cross elasticities with leisure, I find that the optimal tax system crucially depends on factor shares and elasticities of...

The assumption that household income is strongly and positively correlated with a household's real standard of living provides the basis for the joint taxation of families, which has the effect of discriminating against married women as second earners. This paper shows, in the context of a model...