The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of...

The increasing availability of rich (panel) data provides many opportunities to test theories on consumption smoothing behaviour. At the same time, the informational requirements in terms of data and modelling are high and very context specific, thus requiring a filtering of essential...

Gender roles in household consumption patterns have been studied in the literature in relation to two models of household behavior; household production model and the unitary versus non-unitary models of the family decision making. The implications of the first model relate to the changes in...

The effect of housing wealth on household consumption is puzzling as existing empirical results do not match with theoretical predictions. Existing theories – life cycle theory, permanent income hypothesis and user cost model – suggest that housing wealth impact should be small. However,...

According to household production function theory households combine marketed goods and nonmarket environmental goods to produce service flows of direct value to the household. This readily explains why, as an input to household production activities, households might have preferences over the...

Widowhood and retirement are likely to change the economic environment of elderly households. While retirement primarily changes income and expenditure patterns, widowhood fundamentally changes the structure of the household. Beside high non-monetary cost of losing the partner, resources are no...

The cost of children is a critical parameter used in determining many economic policies. For instance, correctly setting the tax deduction for families with children requires assessing the true household cost of children. Evaluating child poverty at the individual level requires making a clear...

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children...

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children...

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...