Time Allocation Within the Family: Welfare Implications of Life in a Couple

Abstract

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.

On the Importance of Household Production in Collective Models: Evidence from U.S. Data

“…16 Regarding the market labor supply equations, net expenditure has now a signi…cant impact for the husband. The parameters related to wage rates are quite precisely estimated, especially in the wife's equations where most of them are signi…cant.…”

Labor supply, home production, and welfare comparisons

“…4 The studies of Apps and Rees (1996) and Aronsson, Daunfeldt and Wikstrom (2001) are probably the most notable exceptions. Couprie (2007) estimates a model of domestic and market labor supplies but she supposes that spouses produce a public good (instead of a private one). The strategy of identification is then completely different.…”

Is power more evenly balanced in poor households?

“…In all these cases, the prediction produced by the sharing rule would be biased. Despite these critics, stability of preferences across cohabitational status has been used in various contexts in the collective models literature and can hardly be avoided (Browning et al, 2006a;Couprie, 2007;Laisney, 2002;Vermeulen, 2005). There is no doubt that in the cross-sectional assignable case with …xed prices it is a strong requirement.…”

“…15 To avoid outliers and measurement and prediction errors, the top and bottom 2% of clothing expenditures have been excluded. Figure 2 illustrates the Engel curves for single men and single women, imposing or not monotonicity.…”

“…This assumption has been repeatedly used in studies designed to reconstruct "who gets what" within a couple. (Browning et al, 2006a;Couprie, 2007;Laisney, 2002;Vermeulen, 2006). Here, the non-parametric concavity test proposed by Abrevaya and Jiang (2005) is implemented on both sharing functions.…”