Equivalence scales are often used to adjust household income for differences in characteristics that affect needs. For example, a family of two is assumed to need more income than a single person, but not double due to economies of scale in consumption. However, in comparing economic well-being...

We investigate the relationship between the individual and household indirect utility functions in the context of a collective household model. Our analysis produces new results that explain how the rule governing the distribution of resources among household members is related to the...

In this paper an empirical model is developed where the collective household model is used as a basic framework to describe the time allocation problem. The collective model views household behavior as the outcome of maximizing a household utility function which is a weighted sum of the utility...

Unitary models, assuming a single objective function and unified budget constraint, are traditionally used to model household behavior. Most empirical tests of unitary models rely on endogenous regressors. This paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income, provided...

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals' utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. Koolwal and Ray extend the collective...

Equivalence scales are routinely applied to adjust the income of households of different size and composition. Because of their practical importance for the measurement of inequality and poverty, a large number of methods for the estimation of equivalence scales have been proposed. Until now, no...

We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely...

This article uses a rich panel dataset of 1,741 Swiss households in order to examine the effect of fuel prices on household car travel demand. Elasticities are estimated for different segments of households, based on their socio-economic and psychological characteristics, on the features of...