The present System of National Accounts (SNA93) treats durable consumption goods as consumption goods rather than investment although rentals for owner occupied households is imputed into GDP. We argue that households de facto treat the purchase of durable goods as investments and thus, the...

This paper assesses the effects that an introduction of the French family splitting mechanism would have on German families' labour supply and intra-household consumption behaviour. We use simulated real world microdata created by means of a 'deterministic' collective labour supply model. The...

In the mid-nineties, near all european governments look almost desperately for a panacea against sluggish growth and high unemployment. Since this problem concerns mainly low-skilled workers, the creation of low-profile jobs in the personal service sector still seems to be one of the most...

The conventional view is that Americans work longer hours than Germans and other Europeans but when time in household production is included, overall working time is very similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans spend more time on market work but German invest more in household...

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method fits within the household production framework (Becker 1965), and is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize a freely-available...

The paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium search model where goods are produced exclusively in the market and services are produced both in the market and within the households. We use the model to examine how unemployment and welfare are affected by labor taxes in general and sectoral...

Mainly because of data limitations, the unitary model (dating back to Becker, among others) has been the common-used theoretical framework in microanalysis of the household labor supply. Because of its simplicity, the household members are assumed to allocate time and consumption in consensus,...

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that proportional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unemployment insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits relative to after-tax...

Using representative income and time use-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyse their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach based...

This paper uses data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study to examine the effect of personality traits on the formation and dissolution of domestic partnerships. Selection into marriage is associated with distinctly different personality profiles for men and women born before 1960,...