No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of WisconsinSystem are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT Common preference models offamily behavior imply income pooling, a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband's income and wife's income affects the allocation of goods and time. Testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed.In this paper, we present an alternative test based on a "natural experiment"-a policy change in the United Kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s. Using Family Expenditure Survey data, we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women's clothing and children's clothing relative to men's clothing coincided with this income redistribution.

I n the 1970s, a proposed change in social welfare policy in the United Kingdom excited considerable debate. The universal child allowance, which had consisted primarily of a reduction in the amount withheld for taxes from the father's paycheck, was to be replaced by a cash payment to the mother. An excerpt from the parliamentary debate in the House of Commons Hansard (May 13, 1975) expresses a popular sentiment: "[F]ar from a new deal for families, it will take money out of the husband's pocket on the Friday and put it into the wife's purse on the following Tuesday. Far from being a child benefit scheme, it looks like being a father disbenefit scheme." Popular discussions of family policies such as the U.K. child benefit often concern their presumed effects on distribution within the family-on the relative well-being of husbands, wives and children. The economist armed only with traditional models of the family must view these discussions as naive. Until very recently, the standard of the profession for both theoretical and empirical analysis was a "common preference" model of the family, which assumes that family members act as though they are maximizing a single utility function. A family's common preference ordering may be the outcome of consensus among family members or the dominance of a single family member, but all such models imply that family expenditures are independent of which individuals in the family receive income or control resources. Common preference models imply that all income is "pooled" and then allocated to maximize a single objective function, so that family demand behavior depends on total family income and not the incomes of individual members.

No abstract

No abstract

The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent years, this model has been challenged by game-theoretic models of marriage that do not impose 'pooling' and are, therefore, consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior. In this paper, the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence, and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage.

The prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention, but child-gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy, non-traditional societies. Studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years, however, have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters-boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls, and fathers spend more time with, and are more involved with, sons than daughters. In recent years, economists have begun to contribute to the child-gender literature, reexamining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias. Other economic outcomes, such as market work and earnings, have also been studied, and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour. In general, recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents, but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face.

No abstract