Over the past century fertility behavior in the United Stated has undergone profound changes Measured by cohort fertility the average number of children per married woman had declined from about 5.5 children at the time of the Civil War to 2.4 children at the time of the Great Depression. It is...

This paper proposes a dynamic structural model of labour market and childcare choices for couples within a collective model of decision making. We formalise explicitly the need for childcare as a function of the age structure of the children population in the household then examine the...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household...

We use a lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate intra-couple labor supply decisions and the division of housework under individual and joint income taxation systems. In order to eliminate problems of endogenous intra-couple time use decisions, we exogenously varied not only the taxation...

We document a set of time use patterns in both time series and cross sections. To explain these facts, we propose and estimate a model of time allocation that emphasizes the role of home production technology. We find it necessary to consider both labor-augmenting technology and total factor...

We study variations in housework time and leisure consumption when workers are subject to labor market work hours constraints that prevent them from working the optimal number of hours. Using data from two large nationwide longitudinal surveys, we first document that such constraints are...

We consider the collective model of labor supply with marketable domestic production. We first show that, if domestic production is mistakenly ignored, the "collective" indirect utilities that are retrieved from observed behavior will be unbiased if and only if the profit function is additive....

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...