This study investigates the determinants of women's labor supply in the household context. The main focus is on the effect of a change in male partner's wages on women's work hours. This is linked to the broader question of whether married and cohabiting women make different economic decisions...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

This paper applies the theory of relational contracts to a model in which a couple decides whether to marry or cohabit, how many children to have and subsequently whether to stay together or separate. We make precise the idea that cooperation in a household can be supported by self interest....

This paper considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I use household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within...

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...

Do individuals divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure the attractiveness of new matches in the marriage market? We answer these questions using a structural model of the household and a rich panel dataset from Malawi. We propose a model of the household with consumption, production and...

The economic theory of fertility choice builds predominantly on the unitary model of the household, in which there is a single household utility function and potential intra-household disagreement is abstracted from. Empirical evidence suggests, however, that many (potential) mothers and fathers...

We use a unique survey of Danes who have emigrated between 1987 and 2002 to study intra-family decision-making on international migration. Our survey reached 582 respondents with a Danish partner who was the same as before emigration. We model family decision-making in a bargaining framework and...

This paper applies the theory of relational contracts to a model in which a couple decides whether to marry or cohabit, how many children to have and subsequently whether to stay together or separate. We make precise the idea that cooperation in a household can be supported by self interest....

We investigate the divorce patterns among non‐Western immigrants and natives in Denmark. We focus on marriages entered on or after arrival to Denmark and analyze whether inter‐ethnic marriages result in higher divorce rates and whether divorce behavior differs between first- and...