A collective model of leisure demand, generalised to the production of a household public good, is estimated on the British Household Panel Survey. The sharing rule is identified by using an original parametric framework based on the change of family status: from single-living to couple or from couple to single-living. Womens' ratios of private household expenditures are 40% on average. The level of intra-household inequality appears highly dependent on the intra-household wage gap. Omitting household production in the model would overestimate the ratio by 7 percentage points on average. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.

ABSTRACT:In this paper we present results from an economic experiment with 100 co-habiting couples, to investigate behaviour in a prisoner's dilemma played by spouses. We compare defection behaviour within real couples to pairs of strangers. We observe that one out of four participants choose not to cooperate with their spouse. To understand why spouses might prefer defection, we use a novel allocation task to elicit the individual's trade-off between efficiency and equality within a couple. We further investigate the impact of socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of the couples. We find in particular that lack of preferences for joint income maximization; having children and being married lead to higher defection rates in the social dilemma.

Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. This absence of gender neutrality with respect to workdivision is known as the "work-division puzzle". Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized as competing explanations for this fact. We experimentally control for context and productivity to investigate preferences for work-division by true co-habiting couples, in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the "advantaged" player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which corresponds to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. We show that women do not contribute more than men to the household public good whatever the situation. This result allows us to rule out some of the standard explanations of the work-division puzzle.

We present the results of an experiment measuring social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a cross-country comparison between France and Germany. In particular, we show that German households are more inequality averse and thus less income-maximizing than French households. Decomposition reveals that diverging sample compositions in the two countries drive less than half of the difference, while over half of the initial French/German difference remains unexplained. Beliefs differ significantly from observed behavior in both countries. Incomemaximizing choices are overestimated in the German sample and underestimated in the French. JEL Codes: C71, C91, C92, D13

How does within couples' time-use interactions generate welfare in the family ? In this paper we model economies of scale in time use. Following Browning et al. (2013), we allow intra-household bargaining power to affect the distribution of welfare gains in the family. We estimate the model using the UK Time Use Survey (2000). Results suggest that two singles living apart need about 2h15 more to achieve the same utility level as when living in a couple. A single woman requires on average 55% of the couple time-resources to be as well-off as when she lived in a couple. The time-poverty line is on average 15 hours per individual a day.

The structure of intra-household allocation is crucial to know whether a transfer from a rich household to a poor one translates into a transfer from a rich individual to a poor one. If rich households are more unequal than poor ones, then a progressive transfer among households reduces intra-household inequality, hence inequality among individuals. More speci…cally, two conditions have to be satis…ed for extending Generalized JEL Classi…cation: D63, D13, C14.

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Empirical studies cast doubts upon the efficiency assumption made in standard economic models of household behavior. The allocation of time among men and women between market and household work is highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production, using an experimental design. We compare the allocation of gendered vs. neutral tasks. Our results show that women in the household overspecialize in "feminine tasks" and men in "masculine tasks" compared to what their comparative advantage would require, hence revealing the influence of gender roles and stereotypes on the couples' behavior.In most countries, the allocation of time-uses remains highly differentiated by gender (Goldschmidt-Clermont and Pagnossin-Aligisakis 1995). Gender inequalities in the sharing of domestic work remain persistent despite the decline in the gender pay gap (Aguiar and Hurst 2007). This observation is puzzling under standard economic assumptions, and is far from being satisfactorily explained by economists. The aim of this paper is to investigate productive efficiency in the household through an incentivized experiment involving established couples and further explore the role of task preferences, gender roles and stereotypes in spouses' specialization choices. In Europe, men spend 55 to 65 percent of their working time in market work, and 35 to 45 percent in household work (Aliaga and Winqvist 2003). Women spend 60 to 70 percent of their working time on domestic tasks and 30 to 40 percent in paid-work and they still carry most of the burdens of household work 1 . This biased specialization of women in household duties and of men in market activities is very likely to interact strongly with women's situation in the labor market. Persisting gender differences in wage rates (Blau and Kahn 2006) and earned incomes, through shorter work duration, as well as through flatter careers, could be the consequence of the unequal sharing of domestic work within the family. Productivity differences between men and women in market activities could explain why their time-allocation decisions differ. However, empirical studies show that variables reflecting productivity in the labor market, such as wage rates and education, are far from being the only factors driving the gendered division of labor (Hersch and Stratton 1994; Aronsson et al. 2001; Anxo et al. 2002; Rapoport and Sofer 2005; Kalenkoski et al. 2009). Using the French Time-Use Survey, Rizavi and Sofer (2010) show that when a woman earns a higher wage than her partner, there is no role reversal. Sevilla-Sanz et al. (2010) find similar results in Spanish data. In the US and in Australia, the gender gap in non-market work is even 1 In France, in 2009, women contributed approximately 80 percent of domestic chores (Régnier-Loilier 2009).