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...

We analyse the effects of retirement of one partner on home production by both partners in a couple. Using longitudinal data from Germany on couples, we control for fixed household specific effects to address the concern that retirement decisions are correlated with unobserved characteristics...

We study the allocation of time in the U.S. and in Europe during 1960-2010. We find that market hours decreased and leisure increased most in France and least in the U.S. Contrary to what standard theory predicts, home hours changed comparatively little. We show that the growth model with home...

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...

In this paper, we assess the impact of international migration, and the induced home-care service labour supply shock, on fertility decisions and labour supply of native females in Germany. Specifcally, we consider individual data of native women from the German Socio-Economic Panel and we merge...

We document for the US and Continental Europe that home-production time remained essentially flat during the last 50 years while changes in market time and leisure offset each other. We then focus on the US and France during 1970-2005 which are on the opposite sides of the spectrum: while US...

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,...

We examine time allocation decisions in same-sex and different-sex couples from a Beckerian comparative advantage perspective. In particular, we estimate the comparative advantage relationship between time spent on either market or household activities and a dummy for being the highest earner in...