Maximisation of utility by a single consumer subject to a linear budget constraint is well known to imply strong restrictions on the properties of demand functions. Empirical applications to data on households however frequently reject these restrictions. In particular such data frequently show...

It is universally accepted that children have important effects on household demand patterns. This is usually attributed to the direct effect of children; for example children are food intensive. Alternative inferences are that the observed correlations between children and demand patterns are...

Several models of intra-household decision making have been suggested in the literature. One important dichotomy is between non-cooperative and cooperative models (including specific models of bargaining). The other important distinction is between models that allow for caring and those that do...

Allocations familiales et autres transferts cibles sont generalement verses aux meres, sur la base de l`observation qu`augmenter la part des ressources controlees par les meres conduit a ameliorer le bien-etre des enfants. Nous recensons un ensemble de resultats empiriques qui etablisent le...

We derive distributional effects for a non-cooperative alternative to the unitary model of household behaviour. We consider the Nash equilibria of a voluntary contributions to public goods game. Our main result is that, in general, the two partners either choose to contribute to different public...

This paper considers the identification of the effect of tobacco on mortality. If individuals select into smoking according to some unobserved health characteristic, then estimates of the effect of tobacco on health that do not account for this are biased. We show that using information on...

Using the Progresa data from Mexico, we investigate intra-household decision making using a variety of outcomes. We exploit both the experimental nature and the (short) panel dimension of the data to measure the impact of exogenous changes in the intra-household distribution of resources on...

In this note we identify and clarify a confusion that has arisen in the literature about the exact relationship between unitary and collective models and what enters the Pareto weight and the sharing function. We suggest that we should denote as `unitary` any model that leads to outcomes that...

This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Individuals with a longer potential life expectancy have more incentive to cut...

In this paper, we estimate a collective model of household consumption and test the restrictions of collective rationality using z-conditional demands in the context of a large Conditional Cash Transfer programme in rural Mexico. We show that the model is able to explain the impacts the...